WHAT IS SELENIUM?

Selenium is an open source test automation tool or framework which will allow you to automate web applications/websites in various browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari. Mainly it is used for web application automation for testing purposes, but you can do more than that.

WHAT YOU CAN DO?

For an example, If you are extracting data from some website on a daily basis as part of your role, You can automate those kind of boring activities though selenium. It will save your time and effort.

HOW IT IS GOING TO WORK?

When you execute selenium script, it will launch your web browser on your laptop or computer, and It will enter the website address in the URL bar and it will extract the details which you wanted to extract. Also, you can write a code to save the extracted data into excel file or text file.

It is faster than a human user. If you take 2hrs to extract the details from web, selenium will take just 20 minutes to do the same.

Likewise, you can use the selenium as per you need and the requirement. But it is Mainly used for regression testing. 

WHAT IS REGRESSION TESTING?

When developer introduces new features in the existing application or when developer fixes the bug of an application, we have to make sure that a code change hasn’t broken any existing functionality. So Testing the existing functionalities or features of an application when code change was done which is called Regression Testing

In Real world scenario, the enterprise applications will have so many features in it. When developer changes some piece of code in the application to fix the issue or to introduce new features, we have to make sure the change hasn’t broken any existing functionalities.

The Manual Tester might have 2000+ test cases on their regression suite and if they execute all 2000+ test cases manually that will take many days to complete their testing which will affect the application release date or go live date.

Here selenium comes into the picture. If we automate those 2000+ test cases using selenium. We will be in a position to complete all 2000+ testcase in one night and it doesn’t require any human effort

SELENIUM SCRIPTING LANGUAGE SUPPORT

Selenium supports many scripting languages such as Java, C#,JavaScript, python ,ruby and etc. You can find more supported languages in seleniumhq.org. 

You can choose the programming language in which you are comfortable. If you are comfortable in Java, then you can go for selenium. I am comfortable with Java and we can find many supporting materials for Java in the internet. So, I am using Java as selenium scripting language.

Even if you are not familiar with programming languages, still you will be able to write selenium scripts through tutorial. So, don’t worry about the programme at this stage. While leaning selenium scripts, you can learn Java as well.

BASIC THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW IN JAVA

1. Declarations
2. Variables
3. If loop
4. For Loop
5. List
6. Arrays

THE ADVANTAGES OF SELENIUM

1. Open source/free software– You can download it form the seleniumhq.org website and start using it. You don’t need to pay for the selenium
2. Easy Installation– It is simple. You just need to import the selenium Jar file into Java project
3. Speed: It Executes the actions faster than human users. So we can save a lot of time, money and investment on resource
4. Compatibility: It supports multiple operating systems (Windows, Linux, Mac) which means you can ensure that your application works in all the operating system and browser
5. Allows cross browser testing– Same script can execute in all the browsers which means you don’t need to create separate script for each browser
6. Parallel execution– You can also execute scripts in parallel. Again, this will help you to reduce the overall execution time. Also, it will help us to increase test coverage. 
7. Integration with 3rd party tools– Yes Selenium web driver supports multiple programming language so you can integrate third party tools/plugin with selenium.