Selenium can be used by software organizations for automating web application testing. Additionally, it can also be used for developing automated test suites, and automating functional regression testing. Selenium test automation is offered by many organizations all over the world. Their test automation frameworks are built using Selenium and are heavily relied upon for web and mobile application testing. They have invested considerable time and resources in creating them.
In order to optimize testing, success factors aka best practices play a key role. Before diving into them, let’s get back to the basics of selenium first.
What is Selenium?
Web applications can be validated across various browsers and platforms using Selenium, a free (open-source) automated testing framework. Scripts for Selenium Tests can be written in various programming languages such as Java, Python, C#, etc. Testing done with Selenium is commonly referred to as Selenium Testing.
Benefits Of Selenium Test Automation
The advantages of Selenium Test Automation hold relevance across a wide range of industries. It enables the recording and replay of web application scripts as well as the ability to run multiple tests on various browsers. Other benefits of selenium are as follows:
- Open-Source:
In addition to being freeware and a portable tool, Selenium has the advantage of being free and open source. You can freely download it, and it is supported by the community online.
Language support:
With Selenium, developers and testers can simulate web applications in Java, Python, C#, Ruby, Perl, Groovy, and JavaScript, among others. Selenium also goes along well with these frameworks.
- Supports Operating Systems:
The Selenium suite of solutions allows you to create tailored testing suites across multiple Operating Systems (OS) including Windows, Linux, Mac, and UNIX. With Selenium, you can create your testing suite on any platform and then execute it on another. For example, you can run a Windows-based test case easily on a Linux-based system.
- Cross-browser compatibility:
In addition to supporting multiple browsers, Selenium also supports Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Chrome, and Safari, ensuring a comprehensive and efficient test execution.
- Support for programming languages and framework
In addition to integrating with programming languages, Selenium is compatible with a variety of frameworks. For instance, it can be used to compile source code with ANT or Maven frameworks. Additionally, it can be used to test applications and generate reports using the TestNG framework. To support other features, it can be integrated with Jenkins or Hudson for Continuous Integration (CI) and also with other open-source tools.
The Three Most Important Selenium Automation Testing Success Factors
In this section of the blog, we will have a look at the three most important factors that can make your selenium automation testing a success.
- First success factor: Testability of the system must be ensured
Organizing and designing tests affects outcomes. You must also note that developers also contribute to the ease of automation. This ease or lack of ease is known as “testability.” All parties in the project should comprehend and agree to this priority. It is important to incorporate a testing and an automation strategy pretty early in the life cycle of any system or feature. If you include a testing and automation strategy early, it will pay off in the future.
Application design and architecture can have a significant impact on testability. Tests can be more intensive and easier to automate if a system has tiers, components, and services, as well as include automated non-UI testing. Besides good application architecture and design, testing can be made easier with dedicated measures. Such actions usually require very little effort but have a boundless deal to do with enhancing testability. Some of them are:
- Testing on user interfaces can be pretty challenging due to the fact that the test interacts with elements designed for human interaction. UIs are usually subject to frequent changes and improvements, so they are inherently volatile. The use of UI testing tools can assist testers in identifying screen elements with mapping capabilities, but it can be difficult to create and maintain a working automation. A hidden identifying property can be assigned values by developers to make the process much easier. An HTML element can be enhanced with a “qa id” attribute, or a control in a desktop application can have an internal “name” property, or a custom-made control property can also be added. Users can’t see these identifiers, but automation is able to access them easily, and they are usually not affected by new versions of an application. The UI can be defined and shared long before the developer has even built the UI by developers and testers working together.
- Another way to assist in testing is to provide an access to white-box. In user-facing systems, events and data are visualized using an internal model; for instance, a graph is used to visualize numbers. A user-facing representation is not always necessary for testing. Testers should therefore have access to – and even modify – data that would otherwise be difficult to access using non-UI means in an application. It is problematic for a tester to understand the graphical representation of a game unless he or she has internal knowledge of its structure, design, and implementation. The tester may also benefit from capabilities such as slowing down and freezing the game’s time clock, or setting a stage or triggering an event. In order to avoid making bugs found uncredible, this should be done with care. Testing should be made deterministic by getting control over random generators, or – if possible – by allowing a random function to be set by testers.
You can achieve the right timing if you actively wait. It is often necessary for a test tool to wait for the application’s process to finish before it can perform the test. For example, when a test needs to populate a table with values, it will not be possible to continue. It is possible to pause a script for a specified amount of time, but if the wait times are too short or long, then tests may break or become slow. Waiting times can be difficult to predict on virtual machines in particular. It is advisable to actively wait for a condition to become true. Incase a condition is not readily available, developers can make it easier by adding one. Using the table example, they can set a “ready” property to the table that will become true if it isn’t loading.
Because agile teams facilitate a natural collaboration between development, testing, and automation, they are particularly well suited for achieving testability. The importance of efficient and stable automated testing throughout the integration and deployment cycle cannot be overstated, especially when it is accompanied by a DevOps approach. Developing a new version of a component enables you to redirect part of the traffic — something that can only be accomplished as part of development. Testability of an application can be improved by close collaboration between testers and developers, resulting in better project outcomes.
- Second Success Factor: Architect and design tests that are automation-ready
Besides being a technical challenge, test automation also involves good test design in large part. The stability and maintenance of tests will be difficult if they’re not well structured or if they’re too detailed over time, and they’ll be vulnerable to changes in the systems they’re testing. Testing that is automation-friendly can be achieved using a modularized approach such as Action Based Testing (ABT). Modules and keyword-based actions are used to organize ABT tests.
- Modules: Among ABT’s core products are test modules. These modules are composed of test objectives that specify what needs to be tested in each one. It is easier for non-technical team members to read and understand the test module’s tests than for technical team members, since they are written in spreadsheet format. Each test is well-defined by a series of action lines.
- Actions: Testing is composed of actions. Each action is described by an action keyword (“action word”), followed by zero or more data arguments (including input values and expected results). A business action, for instance, could be a user interface action or API operation, such as “select menu” or “start service.” It could also be a business action, such as “create order,” which would place an order in an ERP (and then check on the invoice later). As navigation should not be included in business tests, all business actions will hide navigation details as well.
Try to agree on only sophisticated details in a test case that are relevant to the test when creating a test case. The user does not need to specify any subordinate details such as clicks and inputs when “logging in” or “changing customer phone number” from the end-user perspective. A separate and a reusable automation function common to all tests should be used to hide these low-level details at this point. The result is a test that is more concise, more readable, and more importantly, easier to maintain since the subordinate details aren’t changed individually every time the underlying system changes. This allows low-level details to be respecified (or automated) once and reused in all tests many times.
If an automation transformation is undertaken, both the tests running on legacy applications as well as those running on the new architecture will require to be executed as one test suite during the process. As a result, testing automation and continuous integration/continuous delivery tool chains must be considered to support both environments and architectures while transforming.
- Third Success Factor: Continuous testing should be implemented in DevOps
It is crucial for organizations to build automation-ready test designs and ensure that their systems are testable before they can achieve automation, but continuous testing (CT) can take their automation to a whole new different level. With the help of testing, organizations are not only able to survive the future of software delivery, but also thrive. It can lead to faster feedback, quicker release turnaround, and greater consumer loyalty. To achieve the best continuous testing results, organizations should: Firstly, realize that continuous testing is the most innovative form of testing. Secondly, continuous testing requires even more resources and patience.
- The first step in continuous testing is to create test scripts that will run automated tests using quality test data. Using this method, test teams can save a great deal of time by importing proper test data and manually setting up tests. As a result, they can determine when and how to load as well as refresh data that is dependent on the test suites and datasets they require.
As an example, a smoke test that checks basic functionality needs only a small amount of data, while a test suite that checks bugs related to real data requires much greater quantities. As a test script is executed, the master data will be modified (either added, edited, or deleted), so after each regression run, it’s imperative to refresh the master data to ensure the tests have expected preconditions. Dedicated data pipelines can also be created by testers to prepare test data for the main development pipeline that runs the test suites.
- Testers should also take into account the test agents when provisioning the test machines (PCs, laptops, etc.) or virtual machines. As soon as the machine has been set, the dispatcher distributes the tests efficiently, and the developers and testers should start running them simultaneously. The development or scrum teams can run automated tests simultaneously if they have different needs without waiting for one another to complete theirs. Even if tests are still running on other machines, teams should shut down the test machines in order to avoid extra fees.
- Next, the testing teams need to determine which test cases or modules to use in their test suite. It is important to note that the unit tests are common, they are not the only option. The use of functional tests is a great way to reduce the run time of tests, curtail the feedback cycles, and maximize costs by running against the code changes submitted. The use of artificial intelligence could potentially help determine where code changes have impacted the application and which tests have to be run as a result.
- Testers need to be able to quickly identify any new failures caused that may be caused by new code changes in order to prevent test failures from occurring again. This allows them to reduce manual effort and improves their skill to conduct continuous testing by storing and analyzing failure data to reduce the investigation of test results in the future.
It is more than just a technical challenge to successfully implement test automation. It involves careful planning and collaboration between the development and testing teams. A number of ways can be used by developers and testers alike to enhance test automation outcomes, from well-created tests and architectures to setting up systems under test so they are more testable to implementing testing practices aligned with automation.
Wrap-up!
Our detailed article examines some of Selenium’s success factors as well as some of the advantages of using Selenium for automation testing. It is important to keep in mind that Selenium is designed for automation testing, and you might find favorable results. LambdaTest offers Selenium automation testing for 3000+ browsers and operating systems.
With LambdaTest it is possible to conduct automated browser testing on more than 3,000 real browsers and operating systems online using a cloud-based Selenium Grid. All popular test frameworks are supported on the platform. With Selenium Grid, parallel tests can be executed on a highly scalable and reliable platform, further improving performance.
