Selenium for Automation

Software testing used to be a purely manual job, until automated software testing such as Selenium came to the party. Automation tools are found to increase efficiency and help achieve better results.

There are a lot of automated testing tools, which include Selenium, Watir, TestComplete, Ranorex etc. Since there are a lot of options for this purpose; why should Selenium be your choice for automated testing? At the end of this article, you would understand why selenium is good for automated testing and should be your best bet.

1. It is open source and popular:

There are a lot of automated testing tools out there, and only a handful are free to use. Tools such as TestComplete, Unified Functional Testing are paid testing tools which provide just about the same functionality Selenium provides.

The open source status means in essence, is rapid response paid to software bugs, as well as regular updates being provided to constantly improve the tool performance and bring about new features.

Asides being open source, it is also a popular tool. A tool being open source isn‘t a guarantee of it having a large community of users. Users only stick to what works, and the fact that it has a large user community should be enough proof of its potential. This means you can find solutions to issues when you hit a brick-wall. You do not have to put in a lot of effort finding a solution; chances are that someone in the community has faced the same issue.

2. It supports a large range of languages:

Selenium supports a lot of languages. Therefore you do not have to learn a new language to make use of the tool, as it would most likely support your favourite language. The languages supported include Java, Pearl, Python, Ruby, C#, JavaScript etc.

3. It supports multiple operating systems:

There a lot of automated testing tools out there that are OS specific. However, Selenium has been tailored to work across different operating systems.

It supports the Windows, UNIX, Linux and Mac operating systems. This makes it easy to work with, as it doesn‘t enforce an operating system on the user. The user now has the choice of using the tool with the operating system that favours the most.

4. It can be used for different application platforms:

Selenium can be used for web application testing. This tool supports a lot of browsers for web application testing, such as Chrome, Firefox, Opera etc.

Asides supporting web application testing, it can also be used for mobile application testing, using Selendroid (Selenium for Android) on Android devices and the Selenium Appium tool for carrying out automated testing on iOS and Android devices.

5. It can be integrated with continuous integration tools:

Continuous integration is vital in the deployment of software. The good news is that Selenium can be integrated with the popular continuous integration tools such as Jenkins, Hudson etc.

Rounding up

These are the top five reasons to use Selenium. However, there are a lot of other reasons why it should be the go-to tool when it comes to automated testing. It is also very reliable and can be integrated with frameworks such as ANT for improved software compilation.

Whatever it is you want to achieve with automated testing, chances are very high that Selenium is capable of doing. Contact us to learn more about automation and how to improve your overall testing needs.