Advantages And Disadvantages Of Selenium

Selenium is currently an open-source automation tool’s most powerful freeware. Jason Huggins and his team designed it. These versions can be downloaded and used free of charge under the Apache 2.0 license. 

Selenium is easy to start with for basic web application functional testing. It supports web-based recording and replay testing. Selenium supports multithreading features, i.e., several script instances could be run on various browsers. Selenium WebDriver is an API and protocol which allows web browser programming is one of the benefits of automation testing.

What is Selenium IDE?

Selenium IDE is mainly a record/run tool used for the creation of Selenium Test Cases by the creator of the test case. Selenium IDE is a Selenium Test Suite application that is easy to use and can also be used by anyone new to build automated web test cases.

There is no need for special set-ups for starting with Selenium IDE. Just add your browser extension. Selenium IDE gives us a GUI for quick monitoring of our experiences with the website. Selenium IDE enables a user or a creator of a test case for producing and subsequently editing test cases and test suites as necessary. 

The development environment also offers the ability to translate test cases into various programs which facilitates the user’s use and does not involve the knowledge of a particular programming language.

Selenium IDE is a browser extension available to Chrome and Firefox. The integrated development environment enables user actions to be captured and replayed. Selenium Grid is a proxy server that allows several computers, operating systems, and browsers to run testing simultaneously. 

Advantages and Disadvantages of Selenium provide users with the ability to conduct automated tests in a very short time. It does not require programming or engineering, but it is still very much capable.

What are Advantages of Selenium

Following are the different advantages of selenium:

1. Low Barrier for Entry

Selenium IDE is a Chrome and Firefox browser plug-in. It means that virtually no technical expertise is needed to install and start testing by recording and replaying user behavior. The IDE’s graphical interface often allows users who are not inherently trained in a WebDriver-supported programming language to be made aware of the process of modifying or editing tests. Moreover, Selenium IDE also allows users to incorporate advanced logic such as assertions, control flow (if any), and looping (e.g., do x while y is true) (e.g., do x while y is true) (e.g., do x while y is true).

2. Test Suites are Light-Weight and Very Portable

It is stored as a “.side” file (for example, “my test. side”) when we save a test or a test suite for a SIDE. The tests can be easily edited by modifying them or comparing their contents in JSON format. An example of how editing could change all starting URL instances in a text editor such as Sublime Text using “find and replace” functionality. It also makes test files tiny and easy to portably. It can be shared employing team collaboration apps such as Slack and MS Teams or dedicated to a repository code like git as an email attachment. The industry standard for the benefits of automation testing is open source and free.

3. Now .side files can be run from the Command Line

When expanding our range of the browsers being evaluated or conducting tests in parallel, there is a slightly more technical solution that allows us to execute files on the “side.”

4. Well Documented

A specific population of Selenium users and questions and answers valued over the years are available online is one of the advantages of selenium. Nevertheless, a word of caution: some of the papers and Q&As refer to previous SIDE versions and do not apply to the new edition. 

5. Supports Plug-Ins

Selenium IDE enables plug-ins to be developed. We can add features based on our needs to SIDE if we have an in-house development team. If we have no internally available tools, there are many third-party and open-source plug-ins, which would probably suit our needs.

6. Export Code

One of Selenium IDE’s most requested and long-awaited functionality is now live – testing in many common scripting languages for test suites can now be exported. JUnit (Java), Pytest (Python), and Mocha are examples of these (Javascript). 

This feature opens the door to users’ quick test prototyping without any technical expertise. These tests can easily be passed to engineers who can modify or run them with the WebDriver. In contrast to WebDriver checking, this workflow will greatly reduce the development time.

What are Disadvantages of Selenium

Third-party or open-source plug-ins have solved several things in the section on limitations of selenium. Furthermore, the Selenium IDE continues to be involved. The “code export” feature was on the list of downsides to explain how this impacts the product.

1. Overhead and Upkeep

When our web application grows and develops, some Selenium paths will change to locate objects is one of the disadvantages of selenium. For example, if an entity changes its “name” or “id” attributes, it can no longer be identified, and an update is needed for the test. 

If new elements are applied to a specific page, the ‘XPath’ will also shift to the original parts, which may be unattainable by Selenium. It uses for most web automation testing applications, but it is worth noting. 

The bigger and heavier the test suite, the more maintenance it requires. For this purpose, Selenium IDE is perfectly suited for shorter test cases such as smoke checking, but not so for a complete regression test.

2. No Data-Driven Scripts

Selenium IDE does not accept importing data from an external file such as an a.csv file and then running checks on any document inside it at the time this article was written. According to several project developers on Github.com, all are developing local support, and plug-ins are also being created.

3. No Built-In Reporting Capabilities

Limitations of selenium include not having a monitoring functionality, although many plug-ins cover this.

4. No Technical Support

One of the drawbacks of the product is that there is nobody to call when things go bad. Nevertheless, as described in the benefits column, there is a wide variety of people, and many of the complaints we may have had on blogs and forums have already been resolved. 

Advantages and Disadvantages of Selenium as a test system does not have any constraints, but it is a useful tool by itself and merits its spot in every research team’s toolbox.

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