Selenium : Test Automation tool for Web Based applications

Selenium Introduction

Selenium is a test automation tool for web based applications.

Selenium Components

Selenium is composed of 3 components

Selenium-IDE

Selenium-IDE is IDE for building Selenium test cases. It works as a Firefox add-on. Selenium-IDE records user actions as they are performed and store them as a reusable script to play back later. Recorded script can be edited to get test cases for more precision and control.

Selenium-IDE works on Firefox only add-on. Tests created in it can also be run on other browsers by using Selenium-RC.

Selenium-RC (Remote Control)

Selenium-RC allows use of programming language in developing test logic. For instance, if the application under test returns a result set, and if the automated test program needs to run tests on each element in the result set, the programming language’s iteration support can be used to iterate through the result set, calling Selenium commands to run tests on each item.

Selenium-RC provides an API (Application Programming Interface) and library for each of its supported languages: HTML, Java, C#, Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby. This ability to use Selenium-RC with a high-level programming language to develop test cases also allows the automated testing to be integrated with a project’s automated build environment.

Selenium-Grid

Selenium-Grid allows the Selenium-RC solution to scale for large test suites or test suites that must be run in multiple environments. With Selenium-Grid, multiple instances of Selenium-RC are running on various operating system and browser configurations; Each of these when launching register with a hub. When tests are sent to the hub they are then redirected to an available Selenium-RC, which will launch the browser and run the test. This allows for running tests in parallel, with the entire test suite theoretically taking only as long to run as the longest individual test.