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.
WebLOAD is an imperative tool for our web manager and developers team. We rely heavily on this in our daily activities, mainly to run script testing (in record time) of new code prior to our build releases. This product helps us identify potential gaps and issues with the user flow and allows us to make adjustments and fix problems before they make it into the live production site. Our team also depends on this software to run multiple load testing of each server in preparation for heavy timeframes of the year, such as Cyber Monday, Black Friday, etc. Our team members brought up that they would love to see more scripting examples of how to use WebLOAD, which would make their job easier.
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.
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.
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.
There are many similar comparable products on the market, but with WebLOAD, the price point was reasonable. Their sales and engineering teams and very friendly and helpful and make our implementation a breeze. I would definitely renew our contract and recommend this to anyone out there looking for the best load-testing tool!
