Benefits of Selenium Test Automation with an Agile approach

 Selenium, one of the most preferred Open Source Test Automation platforms, seems to have caught the fancy of testers worldwide for offering a seamless and user-friendly Selenium test automation platform. It facilitates an easy to plug and play Selenium automation framework for testing web applications. In this highly competitive nature of online business, companies are under tremendous pressure to release websites and web applications at a quicker rate than their competitors. Reaching faster to the market is critical, but ensuring quality is equally business critical.

Quality is needed to ensure that customers get the desired experience and they keep coming back to the application. Eventually, the application is able to achieve its ultimate business objectives. This is where the role of test automation comes into play, as manual testing can leave much to be desired in terms of time taken, high input cost, and a lack of test coverage area.

Specifically, carrying out test automation on web applications would mean writing test scripts for various browsers and OS platforms. This, even though is far better than following a manual regression testing, is very much time consuming. The reason being, writing test automation scripts for various processes and functions by following the standards can be a challenging exercise. How can Selenium Test Automation add value in this context? Why are testers and developers specifically preferring Selenium specifically in an Agile context?

Why choose Selenium in an Agile environment?

Agile environment demands quick codes, faster turnaround, shorter testing cycles, and frequent releases powered by faster feedback. Selenium enables the Agile approach by offering a browser compatible platform that offers round-the-clock assistance for frequent releases. Selenium is an open source testing platform that facilitates an easy way of writing Selenium test automation code, across various browsers and OS platforms.

Moreover, it has an active developer community that helps in updating the platform from time to time by removing hidden glitches. Also, the GUI based environment makes it convenient to write Selenium test automation codes to validate different web applications and their functionalities.

Benefits of using Selenium automation testing in an Agile set-up

1.      Open Source: The open source Selenium automation framework makes it ideal for enterprises to carry out test automation without sourcing it from a single licensed vendor. Moreover, since it comes free of cost, enterprises can save a substantial amount on writing automation scripts for validating functional efficiency of the web application. Given the number of dedicated Selenium developers working on the product, the platform remains seamless and relatively glitch free. You can even receive assistance from a community-based group anytime. 

This article original publish at Medium.com : Benefits of Selenium Test Automation with an Agile approach

The Best 4 Ways to Build a Selenium Testing Strategy

                     

The need for software testing in the entire SDLC process has increased for various reasons. Ranging from ensuring the quality of software, shorter software lifecycle by preventing rework, faster time to market and customer satisfaction to achieving brand popularity and ROI. However, testing per se need not ensure the above objectives given the limitations of the manual way of doing it. This calls for the automation by using a number of tools, both open source and licensed. Open source tools (read dynamic web applications) such as JUnit, WebDriver, SOAP UI, JMeter or Robotium, and Selenium take the cake by a long measure.

What is Selenium Testing?

It is an open source user interface driven automation tool for faster testing of web applications by covering a large number of test scenarios. Apart from being freely available, Selenium functional testing can provide a slew of key benefits such as;

• Easy to write reliable and maintainable test scripts by using popular languages like Java, PHP, Perl, C#, Ruby, .Net, Scala, Groovy and Python through the use of a domain specific language called Selenese.

• No need to learn a specific test scripting language like Selenium IDE thanks to the presence of a record or playback tool.

• Testing can be performed on any of the OS platforms, be it Windows, Linux, or Mac.

• The testing process is not limited to a single browser but can be carried out on any browser such as Chrome, Bing, Safari, Opera or Firefox.

• Can be used with other testing tools such as JUnit or TestNG to generate reports and carry out further testing.

 

Nonetheless, the benefits of opting for Selenium testing services involves the following aspects as well.

• Being open source, there is no specific support for Selenium save for the ones provided by the user community.

• To enable image based testing one needs to integrate a software called Sikuli.

• Carrying out Selenium testing in fast moving environments can be difficult.

Testing can be quite slow vis-a-vis an API level test. This can have a significant bearing when the demand is for a faster feedback.

Read more: https://medium.com/@michaelwadejr12/how-to-build-the-right-selenium-testing-strategy-in-4-ways-580a04ace761