Selenium Tutorial

Selenium Tutorial

Selenium is one of the most popular, open-source tools used for automation testing. It was developed by Jason Huggins in 2004 as an internal tool. It provides various special features and supports multiple browsers like Chrome, Mozilla, and IE using specific drivers. Moreover, working on Selenium is not confined to one language, which means Selenium supports multiple languages like C#, Java, Python, Ruby, etc. Selenium is much more than a tool having different components for automating a web application. Components in Selenium are Selenium Remote Control (RC), Selenium Integration Development Environment (IDE), and Selenium Grid Webdriver. It is written in Java language having its latest version 3.11.0.

Why do we need to learn Selenium?

Testing any software application repeatedly and manually is a tedious and inefficient task. Looking into these disadvantages, automation testing came into the picture, where test scripts can be written once and are automatically executed any number of times and when required. Selenium is one of the easy-to-learn tools to start working with automation testing. Moreover, Selenium has wide support for extensions and provides an amazing way of reporting test results. It provides amazing support for different OS like Windows, Android, iOS, etc. It can be deployed on various platforms like Windows, Linux, Solaris, etc, which makes it more trending to use as an automation tool.

Applications of Selenium

Selenium is basically used for automating the test cases, be it regression testing, functional testing, or webUI testing, which was a headache before running them manually. It helps in reducing testing time and increasing efficiency. As Selenium is an open-source tool, it is free to use, so no extra cost is burdened on the business. In fact, it helps in reducing the overall business cost by reducing the human resources deployed in running the test cases manually. Apart from normal regression and webUI testing, Selenium also supports Performance testing through the automation framework. It provides excellent support to integrate with advanced tools like Docker, Jenkins, and Maven, which helps the tester to work in an integrated environment easily.

Example

Below given is a short example of writing a simple code of entering the values in the text box using Selenium in Java language.

WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver();
String url = "https://www.educba.com/login/";
driver.get (url);
WebElement email = driver.findElement(By.id("email"));
WebElement pass = driver.findElement(By.id("password"));
email.sendKeys("[email protected]");
pass.sendKeys("eduedu");
driver.findElement(By.id("Login")).submit();
driver.close();

In the above code, we are using the Java language to enter the values of email and password and submit those values by clicking on the Login button.

Pre-requisites

To start learning Selenium, one should have a basic understanding of any Object Oriented programming languages like Java, C#, etc. As Selenium supports multiple languages, having an understanding of basic programming concepts is enough to start learning Selenium. Moreover, one should know about testing techniques like Functional testing, webUI testing, Regression testing, etc.

Target Audience

Programmers having knowledge of object-oriented programming language find it easy to start creating the test scripts in Selenium IDE. Though we have designed our tutorial in such a way as to make it easy to learn for both beginners and advanced-level programmers.