Selenium Automation Tool (Selenium IDE)

When we talk about Software Testing, Test Automation is one of the areas where most of the software Testers would like to be involved and I am one of them.

I always try to find tools which can make my life easy in terms of Software Testing. I have tried so many software test automation tools but Selenium is the only Tool I like very much. It is very useful, very easy to learn, having all good / necessary / important features which should be available in any Automation Tool.

Selenium is one of the most powerful tools available in the Market created by developers at ThoughtWorks and released publicly as an Open Source project on OpenQA.

As per my information this is the only tool that supports multiple browsers and multiple operating systems. Following are the list of Operating Systems and Browsers.

Operating systems:

Windows, Linux, and Macintosh

Web browsers:

Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, and Safari

There are total three variants of Selenium:

1. Selenium IDE (It is a Mozilla Firefox Add-on)

2. Selenium Core (It is a test tool for web application, It runs in local Browser)

3. Selenium Remote Control also called Selenium RC (Widely used because of so many languages support)

You must be thinking why all above three different selenium components are require and what is the use of each one of them, so let me tell you that all these three different components are not at all related to each other. You can use any one of them independently to automate your testcases.

My Experience:

Let’s discuss about “Selenium IDE”. It is an Integrated Development Environment for performing Selenium tests. If you look at the Image, you will get an idea of how it looks like.

It has a very simple small window and from Firefox Browser tool menu we can launch Selenium IDE.

It looks like a very small application (Firefox Add-on) but when you will compare its features/functionalities with some other automation tools then you will come to know the real power of Selenium IDE.

When I had looked at this tool first time, my very first thought was – “we cannot do anything using this tool, it is very small and also it does not have many options to automate difficult testcases which require all different types of checkpoints. But when I started using Selenium IDE, I liked it very much. The most powerful automation tool I have used ever.

Different Options/Features available in Selenium IDE:

Selenium IDE has total four menus but out of those four one called “Options” is the most important menu. Without that menu I think Selenium IDE is nothing.

There is a small tool bar where it has all the options to record the test.

– First option on tool bar is to control the speed of the play back speed

– Next option is for running entire test suites

– After that, button will help you to run opened Testcase if any

– You can pause running Testcase using the next button

– To debug you have to use 5th number button

– If you want to run testcases using test runner then you can use 6th number button

– Next button allows controlling record operation, when that button is pressed everything you do on web browser will get recorded into the Selenium IDE as a Testcase.

So using the above tool bar options you can record the testcases and later we can run the same testcases.

The beauty of this Tool is once the Testcase is recorded into HTML format – you can convert the same Testcase into following languages.

– Java (JUnit)

– Java (TestNG)

– Groovy (JUnit)

– C#

– Perl

– PHP

– Python

– Ruby (Test/Unit)

– Ruby (RSpec)

After converting you can directly run those testcases into the Selenium RC. This is the reason why Selenium IDE is so popular in the market.

Logs viewer is also available which displays all the actions performed on web application when we run Testcase using Selenium IDE.

You can create test suites and run multiple testcases in the batch.

Selenium is so popular and powerful because of its advanced features and also all the developers are from the companies like Google, Ibm, yahoo and of course ThoughtWorks!!

Soon I will be submitting another introductory content about Selenium RC. Thanks!!

Reference:

• seleniumhq.org/projects/ide/
• www.thoughtworks.com/