Selenium - No More Point & Click Tests
August 01, 2017
Selenium - No More Point & Click Tests
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Selenium
We use Selenium WebDriver for our online portal for effective test automation on a variety of use cases. Prior to writing this test automation QA would manually go through test cases manually with a "point & click" approach prior to every release/major feature which resulted in a large amount of time being spent on a simple process that was slowing our release cycle. With writing these test cases in Java using Selenium WebDriver tests they're able to be re-created with even more precision and tests cases quickly. The QA review process of a release went from a day or two to less than an hour.
- Clear and concise documentation. It takes very little time to get up and running.
- Selenium WebDriver is supported in many languages including Java, C#, Javascript, and more. This make it a very versatile tool that can be used anywhere in your tech stack if applied properly.
- Incredibly feature rich, wether you want to check HTML tags, page formatting, test input, send email, etc. Selenium can support it.
- Very dense API for Selenium WebDriver which can make it slightly difficult to find the exact thing you are looking for, keep the API documentation close.
- The Selenium IDE for Firefox is not very good and I would not recommend anyone use it unless your QA is not strong in programming basic tests. It causes more headaches than it is is worth in the long run.
- The parallelism features of Selenium WebDriver feel half-baked and caused us a few issues. I would recommend running serially unless you are seeing a performance hit.
- Greatly decreased the time window for our release cycles
- Allow for quicker and more iterative development since regressions could be caught much quicker
- Better maintenance and control of test cases which gave us much more robust acceptance and regression tests.
- Watir, Cucumber and Mocha
Selenium compared to some of the other products out there is a strong choice. It has support for a lot of languages, it is strongly suited to web-based testing (which may or may not be what you are looking for), and it has strong documentation and an active community. There are some other options such as Mocha that may be able to be written more concisely or if your team is more heavily invested around a single language/technology other technologies may be a better choice. But for a general web testing framework that can be used by a number of people from different technology stacks in your company in it is a great choice for limited the number of new technologies you need to introduce. I don't feel like there is any better or worse compared to other technologies that handle web-based regression/acceptance tests it is merely what suits your needs and your team's needs.