7 Essential points you need to know about selenium automation frameworks

Introduction

In this blog "Selenium Foundation Program", we will talk about selenium web-Driver foundation concepts for automation frameworks and understand "when to use these concepts" and "which type of selenium web-Driver automation framework" to be used, and we will also discuss very basics about selenium IDE and Web-Driver with java code.

The main objective of this foundation blog is to help the Selenium automation tester to gain knowledge on Web-Driver skills. Here, we will explain clearly on “what type of selenium automation framework to be used” and “when to use that specific type of selenium automation framework”. We will also discuss some popular selenium web-driver framework interview questions.

What is Selenium API?

Selenium API is a free portable and convenient open source automated testing suite for web applications. This is quite similar to HP Unified Functional Testing (UFT) only that Selenium focuses on automating web-based applications across different browsers.

Why the Name Selenium?

"Selenium" is an antidote for mercury poisoning and during development stage of selenium core, there was another automation product developed by Mercury Interactive (Which is later acquired by HP). So Jason suggested that name “Selenium” to his team members.

Brief introduction to different types of Selenium tools:

 Now-a-Days most of the software applications are designed as web-based applications which run on different browsers. The effectiveness of testing these web-based applications varies widely and "Selenium" is a one of the test automation suite which is mostly used in companies and organizations these days.


Selenium suite is composed of multiple software tools listed below and each of these tools have specific role in test automation.

Selenium Tools:

• Selenium Core
• Selenium RC
• Selenium Grid
• Selenium IDE
• Selenium Web-Driver

"Click here for Selenium-Web-Driver installation instructions-in Windows"

Birth Picture of Selenium Tools:

In 2006 an engineer from Google engineer named Simon Stewart started to work on a project called Web-Driver. This Web-Driver testing tool directly interacts with the browser and Operating system using 'native’ method, thus avoiding the restrictions of a sand-boxed Java-script environment.

Later, On August 6-2009, Selenium test automation tools "Selenium Web-Driver" and "Selenium RC" are merged to form a powerful tool called "Selenium-2" with Web-Driver being the core.

Supporting Browser's and Environment / Platform for Selenium-2:

Selenium 2 (aka. Selenium Web-Driver):

1. Does not have both IDE and programming interface. It has only programming interface.
2. Supports browsers like Chrome, Firefox, IE, Safari and Opera.
3. Supports operating system like Windows, Linux / Unix, Mac, Android and iOS.
4. Supports programming languages like C#, Perl, Python, Node.js, Ruby, .Net, PHP, Java etc...

Conclusion:

• Selenium automation Suite has four components: Selenium IDE, Selenium RC, Web-Driver, Selenium Grid.
• Selenium IDE, a Firefox add-on that you can only use in creating relatively simple test cases and test suites. (Click here to know more about Selenium IDE)
• Selenium Remote Control, also known as Selenium-1, which is the first Selenium tool that allowed users to use programming languages in creating complex tests.
• Selenium Web-Driver, the newer breakthrough that allows your test scripts to communicate directly to the browser, thereby controlling it from the OS level.
• Selenium-Grid is also a tool that is used with Selenium RC to execute parallel tests across different browsers and operating systems.
• Selenium RC and Web-Driver was merged to form Selenium-2.
• Selenium supports different browsers, programming language & operating system.