What is Selenium? The Pros and Cons of using Selenium

What is selenium?

Selenium can be used for testing purposes as well as for automating tasks in the browser. It is often used to test web applications, but it can also be used for other purposes such as automated regression testing or load and performance testing. 

This article is a quick guide to what is selenium? and the pros and cons of using Selenium.

Why selenium?

Selenium is a cross-platform solution for web testing. It supports all the major browsers, operating systems, and programming languages. Selenium can be used for functional, regression, and load testing. Selenium is compatible with other open-source automation tools like Appium, JUnit, and QTP. Selenium has an inbuilt record-playback tool that allows testers to automate the process of clicking on different elements on a webpage or application screen. Selenium can also be integrated with other frameworks like Java, C#, and Python to provide test automation solutions for a variety of platforms. 

Quick reasons to choose selenium for test automation are: 

1) It’s free and open-source

 2) Supports various browsers 

3) Supports various programming languages 

4) Supports devices with different operating systems

5) It has built-in record and playback functionalities

6) Easy to implement test cases

Pros and Cons of using Selenium:

Selenium is a popular tool for testing browsers and websites. It can be used to automate the process of checking for bugs and errors on a website.

There are many pros and cons while using Selenium. But, it can be worth the time investment if you’re looking for a way to automate your testing process or want to save time on repetitive tasks.

Selenium has been around for some time now, so there are many different ways that people use it in their workflow: from running automated tests on all of your pages, to just running them once in a while when you think about it. Selenium is a suite of tools that can be used for web automation. 

Pros of Using Selenium:

• It’s easy to use. It’s more of a side effect. Selenium has the potential to become a victim of its own success. To put it another way, Selenium can make you a victim of your own success. It’s simple to get your first automated tests up and running. It’s also simple to add new ones.
• Many people already have extensive Selenium test automation scenarios in place. These scripts are compatible with both desktop and mobile web browsers. Selenium also works well with continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) and other DevOps tools.
• The learning curve isn’t too high and you can do a lot with it. It’s also safe to use if you have a basic understanding of how it works.-It can be used in conjunction with many other tools such as Python, JavaScript, or Ruby on Rails. 
• Selenium doesn’t need to be the only tool you use and it can be used in multiple ways.-It has a large amount of documentation available. There are blog posts and tutorials on many different topics. It has a lot of documentation on how to integrate with specific testing tools like JUnit, XCTest, etc.

Cons of using Selenium:

Managing Difficulty: But before long, you’ll have a mountain of test data to process and analyze, which can be difficult — if not impossible — to do. When you use Selenium to scale up, you can soon accumulate an unmanageable number of test results to sort through.

Unfortunately, Selenium does not assist in this regard. As a result, when planning your Selenium-based automated testing strategy, keep the big picture in mind. That implies you’ll need more tools to deal with test management, reporting, and so on.

It’s difficult to keep up with: Code is continuously evolving in a DevOps environment. To try to offset the consequences of changing codebases on automated testing, an organization can adopt methods and methodologies. (Consider microservices, for example.) To keep up with the changing environment, it requires a lot of effort.

Inadequate Test Reporting Capabilities: Selenium is an excellent tool for automating, designing, and running tests. Selenium, on the other hand, lacks visibility into test reporting and test data generation.

To sum up, we should use Selenium if we want to automate our tests and we don’t have time to do it manually.