Lewis Carroll once said that “We must run as fast as we can, just to stay in place. And if you wish to go anywhere you must run twice as fast as that.” The rapidly changing business scenario holds this statement true in almost every domain and vertical because businesses want to be completive and relevant. Therefore, many industries are moving towards automation so that they can improve the effectiveness and efficiency of their processes.
It is a challenge for any company to continuously maintain a certain level of quality and efficiency on a regular basis. They need to be agile to provide frequent increments of software without compromising with the software quality. To address the challenge of quality and testing during these frequent increments, businesses need to adopt automation testing to enhance the speed, efficiency, coverage, and quality at a lower cost. The ROI of introducing automation tools is always in the favor of organizations.
While there are many tools available which can be used for automation but selection of these tools must be based on the following parameters:
- Proprietary or open source
- Type of application testing:
- Web application
- Mobile app—Android, iOS
- Framework based on the application type
- Reusability, scalability, and maintainability
- Ease of use, scripting language support, community support, reporting capability, training cost etc.
Why Choose Selenium?
Selenium is a good choice to automate testing of the web application for developing functional and regression test suites. It can provide the following benefits:
- Cross browser automation and support
- Open source tool with strong community support
- Scripts can be written in various languages such as Python, Ruby, C#, Java, PHP, and Perl etc. QA tester can choose any language based on their capabilities
- Customization capability by creating a relevant and project specific framework
- Code reusability with ease of maintenance
In order to ensure application maintainability and scalability, code reusability, effective reporting, and organized data, businesses use frameworks. Depending on the nature of the application, the framework can be designed and customized to meet the project objectives. Following are types of frameworks businesses usually use:
- Modular framework
- Data-driven framework
- Keyword-driven framework
- Hybrid framework
- Page object framework
Selenium allows businesses to run tests on different machines in different browsers and operating system. To test the maximum potential of this powerful tool, you can follow the following best practices:
- Utilize Selenium features along with a suitable, project-specific-customized framework
- Use appropriate reporting mechanism based on project requirement
- Focus on code and keyword reusability
- Design test cases which are independent to each other so that it is easy to control the impact of change in functional flow or choose the sequence/priority of test run
- Choose the scripting language wisely
With the software development becoming agile, the responsibility to ensure the quality of application on each increment is vital. The inclusion of automation tool in the quality assessment of the application will make sure that defect-free application can be deployed each time.
