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1. INTRODUCTION

1.1 Testing Automation tools

Many, perhaps most, software applications today are written as web-based applications to be run in an Internet browser. The effectiveness of testing these applications varies widely among companies and organizations. In an era of highly interactive and responsive software processes where many organizations are using some form of Agile methodology, test automation is frequently becoming a requirement for software projects. Test automation is often the answer. Test automation means using a software tool to run repeatable tests against the application to be tested. For regression testing this provides that responsiveness.

There are many advantages to test automation. Most are related to the repeatability of the tests and the speed at which the tests can be executed. There are a number of commercial and open source tools available for assisting with the development of test automation. Selenium is possibly the most widely-used open source solution. This user’s guide will assist both new and experienced Selenium users in learning effective techniques in building test automation for web applications.

Test automation has specific advantages for improving the long-term efficiency of a software team’s testing processes. Test automation supports:

Frequent regression testing Rapid feedback to developers

Virtually unlimited iterations of test case execution

Support for Agile and extreme development methodologies Disciplined documentation of test cases

Customized defect reporting

Finding defects missed by manual testing

It is not always advantageous to automate test cases. There are times when manual testing may be more appropriate. For instance, if the application’s user interface will change considerably in the near future, then any automation might need to be rewritten anyway. Also, sometimes there simply is not enough time to build test automation. For the short term, manual testing may be more effective. If an application has a very tight deadline, there is currently no test automation available, and it’s imperative that the testing get done within that time frame, then manual testing is the best solution.

1.2 Selenium Evolution

Selenium first came to life in 2004 when Jason Huggins was testing an internal application at ThoughtWorks. Being a smart guy, he realized there were better uses of his time than manually stepping through the same tests with every change he made. He developed a Javascript library that could drive interactions with the page, allowing him to automatically rerun tests against multiple browsers. That library eventually became Selenium Core, which underlies all the functionality of Selenium Remote Control (RC) and Selenium IDE. Selenium RC was ground-breaking because no other product allowed you to control a browser from a language of your choice.

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While Selenium was a tremendous tool, it wasn’t without its drawbacks. Because of its Javascript based automation engine and the security limitations browsers apply to Javascript, different things became impossible to do. To make things “worst”, webapps became more and more powerful over time, using all sorts of special features new browsers provide and making this restrictions more and more painful.

In 2006 a plucky engineer at Google named Simon Stewart started work on a project he called WebDriver. Google had long been a heavy user of Selenium, but testers had to work around the limitations of the product. Simon wanted a testing tool that spoke directly to the browser using the ‘native’ method for the browser and operating system, thus avoiding the restrictions of a sandboxed Javascript environment. The WebDriver project began with the aim to solve the Selenium’ pain-points.

Jump to 2008. That year saw the merging of Selenium and WebDriver. Selenium had massive community and commercial support, but WebDriver was clearly the tool of the future. The joining of the two tools provided a common set of features for all users and brought some of the brightest minds in test automation under one roof. Perhaps the best explanation for why WebDriver and Selenium are merging was detailed by Simon Stewart, the creator of WebDriver, in a joint email to the WebDriver and Selenium community on August 6, 2009.

“Why are the projects merging? Partly because webdriver addresses some shortcomings in selenium (by being able to bypass the JS sandbox, for example. And we’ve got a gorgeous API), partly because selenium addresses some shortcomings in webdriver (such as supporting a broader range of browsers) and partly because the main selenium contributors and I felt that it was the best way to offer users the best possible framework.”

1.3 Introducing Selenium

Selenium is a set of different software tools each with a different approach to supporting test automation. Most Selenium QA Engineers focus on the one or two tools that most meet the needs of their project, however learning all the tools will give you many different options for approaching different test automation problems. The entire suite of tools results in a rich set of testing functions specifically geared to the needs of testing of web applications of all types. These operations are highly flexible, allowing many options for locating UI elements and comparing expected test results against actual application behavior. One of Selenium’s key features is the support for executing one’s tests on multiple browser platforms.

1.4 Selenium’s Tool Suite

Selenium is composed of multiple software tools. Each has a specific role.

Selenium 2 (aka. Selenium Webdriver)

Selenium 2 is the future direction of the project and the newest addition to the Selenium toolkit. This brand new automation tool provides all sorts of awesome features, including a more cohesive and object oriented API as well as an answer to the limitations of the old implementation. Both the Selenium and WebDriver developers agreed that both tools have advantages and that merging the two projects would make a much more robust automation tool.

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Selenium 2.0 is the product of that effort. It supports the WebDriver API and underlying technology, along with the Selenium 1 technology underneath the WebDriver API for maximum flexibility in porting your tests. In addition, Selenium 2 still runs Selenium 1’s Selenium RC interface for backwards compatibility.

Selenium 1 (aka. Selenium RC or Remote Control)

Selenium RC was the main Selenium project for a long time, before the WebDriver/Selenium merge brought up Selenium 2, the newest and more powerful tool.

Selenium 1 is still actively supported (mostly in maintenance mode) and provides some features that may not be available in Selenium 2 for a while, including support for several languages (Java, Javascript, Ruby, PHP, Python, Perl and C#) and support for almost every browser out there.

Selenium IDE

Selenium IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is a prototyping tool for building test scripts. It is a Firefox plugin and provides an easy-to-use interface for developing automated tests. Selenium IDE has a recording feature, which records user actions as they are performed and then exports them as a reusable script in one of many programming languages that can be later executed.

Note : Even though Selenium IDE has a “Save” feature that allows users to keep the tests in a table-based format for later import and execution, it is not designed to run your test passes nor is it designed to build all the automated tests you will need. Specifically, Selenium IDE doesn’t provide iteration or conditional statements for test scripts. At the time of writing there is no plan to add such thing.

The reasons are partly technical and partly based on the Selenium developers encouraging best practices in test automation which always requires some amount of programming. Selenium IDE is simply intended as a rapid prototyping tool. The Selenium developers recommend for serious, robust test automation either Selenium 2 or Selenium 1 to be used with one of the many supported programming languages.

Selenium-Grid

Selenium-Grid allows the Selenium RC solution to scale for large test suites and for test suites that must be run in multiple environments. Selenium Grid allows you to run your tests in parallel, that is, different tests can be run at the same time on different remote machines.

This has two advantages. First, if you have a large test suite, or a slow-running test suite, you can boost its performance substantially by using Selenium Grid to divide your test suite to run different tests at the same time using those different machines. Also, if you must run your test suite on multiple environments you can have different remote machines supporting and running your tests in them at the same time. In each case Selenium Grid greatly improves the time it takes to run your suite by making use of parallel processing.

1.5 Supported Browsers and Platforms

The support platform for Selenium 1.0 apply to the Selenium 2.0 release of Selenium-RC also as

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Browser	Selenium IDE					Selenium 1 (RC)		Operating Systems
Firefox 3.x	Record and playback tests					Start browser, run tests		Windows,	Linux,
								Mac
Firefox 3	Record and playback tests					Start browser, run tests		Windows,	Linux,
								Mac
Firefox 2	Record and playback tests					Start browser, run tests		Windows,	Linux,
								Mac
IE 8	Test	execution	only	via	Selenium	Start browser, run tests		Windows
	RC*
IE 7	Test	execution	only	via	Selenium	Start browser, run tests		Windows
	RC*
IE 6	Test	execution	only	via	Selenium	Start browser, run tests		Windows
	RC*
Safari 4	Test	execution	only	via	Selenium	Start browser, run tests		Windows, Mac
	RC
Safari 3	Test	execution	only	via	Selenium	Start browser, run tests		Windows, Mac
	RC
Safari 2	Test	execution	only	via	Selenium	Start browser, run tests		Windows, Mac
	RC
Opera 10	Test	execution	only	via	Selenium	Start browser, run tests		Windows,	Linux,
	RC							Mac
Opera 9	Test	execution	only	via	Selenium	Start browser, run tests		Windows,	Linux,
	RC							Mac
Opera 8	Test	execution	only	via	Selenium	Start browser, run tests		Windows,	Linux,
	RC							Mac
Google	Test	execution	only	via	Selenium	Start browser, run tests		Windows,	Linux,
Chrome	RC							Mac
Others	Test	execution	only	via	Selenium	Partial	support	As applicable
	RC					possible**

* Tests developed on Firefox via Selenium IDE can be executed on any other supported browser via a simple Selenium RC command line.

** Selenium RC server can start any executable, but depending on browser security settings there may be technical limitations that would limit certain features.

Self Assessment Questions

Q.1 When did selenium came to life ?

A.  2003

B.  2004

C.  2005

D.  2006

Q.2 What is called that scale for large test suites or test suites that must be run in multiple environments ?

A.  Selenium-Grid

B.  Selenium RC

C.  Selenium Web driver

D.  Selenium NG

Q.3 What is Selenium IDE ?

A.  Windows Software

B.  Firefox Plug-in

C.  Java Software

D.  Flash Plug-in

Answers : 1-B, 2-A,3-B

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2. SELENIUM IDE

2.1 Installation

The steps for installing the Selenium IDE are

Using Firefox, first, download the IDE from the SeleniumHQ downloads page (http://seleniumhq.org/download/)

Firefox will protect you from installing addons from unfamiliar locations, so you will need to click ‘Allow’ to proceed with the installation, as shown in the following screenshot.