Selenium as a Great Tool to Test Application - An Insight

As an efficient software testing tool, Selenium is used widely for automating web browsers. The portable functional testing tool makes it easier for testers to evaluate the performance of websites and web applications across several web browsers and platforms. At the same time, Selenium can also be used for automating boring and time-consuming web-based administration tasks. Since its inception in 2004, the open source functional testing tool has emerged as a leading portable software testing framework to assess a wide variety of websites and internet applications. A business can use Selenium to effectively automate both web application testing and web-based administration tasks.

Selenium offers choice to developers

Selenium Automation Testing is implemented on Linux, windows, Macintosh, and in windows platforms. Selenium is actually an open source software testing tool designed for distribution in the apache license which is meant for download and for utilizing a distribution platform. Selenium can be defined as portable framework which is used for software testing for any of the web applications. Selenium gives record tools and those are generally known as playback tools and they are helpful to author tests without the need of grasping scripting language for those tests that is known as Selenium IDE. Selenium additionally offers the testers & the developers a choice for writing tests in a number of well known languages used in programming for example C#, Java, python, ruby as well as groovy. Making use of these kinds of well known languages facilitate the testers to run texts against many of the most popular in addition to well known web browsers for example the internet explorer and also chrome.

The effect of upgraded testing operations of selenium on testers

Selenium Testing has been improved the testing functions on every single stage and is helping in great deal of opportunities for the developers. The large scale companies and also the independent corporations are prone in the direction of this particular Testing process. Which creates an excellent and a very bright potential in the field of Software Testing and the Automation. Selenium IDE is a very popular tool, which offers a playback, without the need of getting trained on any scripting language. This particular testing technique works on a particular domain and functions in combination with a lot of high-tech programming languages such as C#, PHP, Java, Groovy etc. This particular testing tool does well on the integrated networks of several web browsers. Selenium Testing tool is in addition multi platform-friendly and also functions very well throughout Windows, Linux and Mac.

Selenium - How it fits in software company testing process?

The highly responsive and interactive software processes demand testing to be carried out so that the ultimate product that reaches the customer turns to be as perfect as possible. For this purpose automated tests find a special place amongst the various processes of a software company. In automated testing a software tool is used for running of repeatable tests on the application in question. There are several tools that can serve the purpose; amongst them a very prominent one is Selenium.

Testing web applications with Selenium- Some major problems

The open source software known as Selenium is used as one of the tools for automation testing of web applications. It certainly provides the testers with a good option for their purpose but one thing that discourages a lot of people when they want to use this is the fact that selenium has quite a number of problems. Often, handling this may be a challenging experience due to multiple problems that may arise, making creation of functional tests an extremely difficult process. In fact, most people complain that the tests can be flaky, sometimes working and sometimes not working. However, the problems should not deter you from using the tool as the advantages are too many to ignore. It is not really unstable or flaky but the main challenge which must be solved to tackle the problem is information. Most of the problems can be sorted out with proper knowledge. Here are some of the problems along with their solutions.

Flaky external services- Relying on such services often lead to failure of all tests. This happens especially when you use production backends or rely on infrastructure that is outside the control of your team. The best way to solve this is not to rely on such services which cannot be controlled by your team. You can start in-process servers by the use of something such as webrick in Ruby or Jetty in Java world. The external services can be spotted by watching the running of tests which will show the actual problem underlying. The flakiness can also be minimized through performing of health check before you run tests. Check if all relying services are running properly or not.

Poor test isolation- This may happen and you may see that the tests are working fine when they are being run alone but during build they fail randomly. To solve this, resources should be isolated as much as possible. Data should be set up within tests so that you do not have to rely on the 'set up datastores' step in the build. Try to set up database for each developer or use something such as SQLite or Hypersonic as an in-memory, light-weight and private database. If users are required to log-in for the applications then several user accounts should be created which are reserved just for the tests; provide a locking mechanism as well so that you can ensure that just a single test is carried out with the use of a specific user account.

Identifying elements- Another very common problem in this is the way of identifying XML/HTML elements that must be observed as well as manipulated. While designing, the application should be made for easy identifying of elements through adding of 'id' which is well-named and attributes to unique elements; along with class attributes that are well-named for repeated structures such as tables or lists. By virtue of attributes you can refer directly to the interested elements easily. You can also start simplifying the locators by creating locators that rely on the essential parts.

Problems in timeouts- This is a very common problem. There are times when the timeout is not long enough, thus the tests fail under load. For that, the best thing that you should do is not use timeouts at all. When using, they should be used by generous setting or using them together with notification from the UI being tested.

During problems with selenium testing, it is best to do some research as well as analysis to find out the main cause so that you can understand the reason for such behavior. Most often the problem is minor and can be solved through the proper resources. No matter what the problem, these days there are plenty of resources to take advantage of. There are several videos, blogs, documentations, user groups, chat rooms, conferences, forums, books, etc which can aid you so that you can use the tool successfully.

You can hire testers from top custom selenium testing company in India who can help you accomplish testing with the selenium tools within allocated budgets and time schedules.

We provide selenium automation testing services. If you would like to discuss with an expert selenium tester from our team, please get in touch with us at Mindfire Solutions.

A Layman step by step approach to doing Selenium automated testing

Selenium comprises an exhaustive set of tools which renders support to test automation development with respect to web-based applications across a number of platforms. This lightweight and open source automation tool can be conveniently integrated into a diverse range of projects, backing up multiple programming languages like Python, Perl, .NET, Ruby and Java.

Selenium Testing for Ajax Application

Ajax and XML constitute a web development system for development of interactive web applications. One of the features of Ajax application is that it does not cause a complete page to get reloaded every time. The browser has an asynchronous call to the server for obtaining the data and then refreshing certain parts belonging to the current page. For enhancement of the web page's response speed, interactivity, and usability, certain changes are needed while testing Ajax applications.

First the web page is acted upon, and then one needs to wait till the asynchronous call is completed. Verification continues after completion of the same. During this time, the need for an appropriate waiting time is felt. You can opt for fixed time pause in the test application, which works successfully in the majority of cases. Under certain circumstances like reduced network throughput, the Ajax call does not get completed following a specific time pause and this leads to test case failure. Again, for an excessively long pause, the test may become unacceptably slow.

Selenium comes with increasingly efficient means to handle waiting. It is possible to use the com.thoughtworks.selenium.Wait class for waiting for a text or element to disappear from or appear in the page. In the until() function it is possible to define the break condition with respect to the wait, or the Wait class can be extended to implement.

Another option is to use the function waitForCondition in Selenium. A JavaScript snippet would be passed to the same as a parameter. Once detection is done by Selenium that the condition is true, it will cease to wait. Waiting can be continued for some text or element to disappear or be present. With the help of the function Selenium.browser.getCurrentWindow(), it is possible to run JavaScript in the application window.

Methods to render support to Dojo applications

Dojo is in fact a regularly utilized JavaScript tool kit for construction of dynamic web interfaces. A crucial aspect in leveraging Selenium for testing of Dojo applications is the recognition of Dojo widgets as well as recording of their actions. Those widgets which are author-defined tend to be in the abstract level. While running the page, widgets get converted to basic HTML code. In this case, auto-generation of HTML codes takes place, thus there can be some differences with conventional HTML widgets.

Actions performed in this case, including checkbox, text field, and radio button may behave in the same manner like HTML widgets. However, when it comes to the combo box, additional widgets including date selector may call for specific handling.

Support for HTTPS website testing

With information security becoming the main focus over the Internet, SSL authentication is being increasingly used by a number of web applications. By default, Selenium IDE renders support to HTTPS, but the same is not possible with Selenium RC. The solution varies according to whether it is Firefox or Internet Explorer.

Effective recognition of web elements with no ID property

Elements can be conveniently located by means of a meaningful name or ID. So far as test cases are concerned, this enhances the readability. Selenium comes up with manifold strategies like CSS, DOM and Xpath for recognition of the elements.

Selenium automated testing provides a lot of benefits to web applications developers. It also provides convenience in handling a pop-up window, download or upload file window or verification of confirmation, alerts or prompts. You can hire developers from top automation testing companies India who can help you accomplish testing with the selenium tools within allocated budgets and time schedules.

We provide selenium automation testing services. If you would like to discuss with certified software testers from our team, please get in touch with us at Mindfire Solutions.