Selenium is open source software for browser automation, primarily used for functional, load, or performance testing of applications.
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CucumberStudio
Score 4.9 out of 10
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CucumberStudio, now a SmartBear product since the 2019 acquisition, is a continuous testing platform replacing the former HipTest, supporting agile development with manual and automated code testing, reusable steps, feature history with living documentation, among other features.
When you have to test the UI and how it behaves when certain actions are performed, you need something that can automate the browsers. This is where Selenium comes to the rescue. If you have to test APIs and not the frontend (UI), I would recommend going with other libraries that support HTTP Requests. Selenium is good only when you have no choice but to run the steps on a browser.
HipTest is good and helpful to create and run functional regressions but it is more complicated to use this tool to create and run API testing scenarios (it does not mean it can not be done). This tool is definitively not appropriate for running performance testing scenarios.
Selenium is pretty user-friendly but sometimes tests tend to flake out. I'd say roughly one out of twenty tests yields a false positive.
Selenium software cannot read images. This is a minor negative because a free plug-in is available from alternate sources.
Slowness may be a minor factor with Selenium, though this is an issue with basically any testing software since waiting on a site to execute JavaScript requires the browser to wait for a particular action.
UX is not too obvious and easy (like generating a data table in a scenario or including a scenario in a test run) but you can get used to it relatively easy by playing around with the options, also the documentation is helpful.
To get extra functionalities you have to pay for them separately.
We love this product mainly because of its high customization abilities and the ease of use. Moreover, its free and can be learned easily through online communities and videos. The tests are more consistent and reliable as compared to Manual tests. It has enabled us to test a large number of features all in one go, which would have impossible through manual tests. The reports generated at the end of the tests are really helpful for the QA and the development teams to get a fair view of the application.
As I mentioned earlier, the reason I use Selenium is because there is a fairly widespread community of users, and user support services are at a good level. because the application is open source, it works on many platforms (Windows, Linux, IOS) without any problems. In addition, it gives us a lot of options for writing functional tests. For errors that we receive through the application, we can easily find the reasons for errors in the forums.
Selenium does not have technical support available easily. You have to go through forums to get the information you need. However, there are excellent forums out there that make it easy to troubleshoot. The open-source flexibility makes it difficult to have dedicated support.
The tool includes a basic but complete documentation that can be very helpful to get started using the tool. The UX sometimes does not feel very easy to understand but after some use you can get familiar without reading the documentation. The webinars are not very useful for using the tool, I have seen a couple of them and they are actually focused on promoting their HipTest product to new users instead of being useful and educational for current users.
We did everything we needed to use it. Now we can execute our tests on different operational systems and browsers running few tests simultaneously. We also implemented Appium framework to execute our tests on mobile devices, such as iPhones, iPads, Android phones and tablets. We use SauceLabs for our test execution and Jenkins for continuous integration.
At the time of adoption, there were not many other alternatives that were even close to being competitive when it comes to browser testing. As far as I know now to this day, there is still little competition to Selenium for what it does. Any other browser-based testing still utilises Selenium to interact with the browser.
