Item: Selenium
Rating: 10
Author: Janice Cruz (L.I.O.N.)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Selenium daily in my organization. We started using it to run basic automation testing of our web forms. This helped us significantly cut down on the amount of time that it was taking to manually submit lead tests. This ended up leading to full automation of entire test suites.

Pros and Cons

The ability to create testing automation
Even without technical experience, I can create test suites and validation using the recording tool
We’ve saved hundreds of hours of manual testing by creating automated test plans with this tool
It’s free

Sometimes the test sites will fail even if the page hasn’t changed

Return on Investment

There hasn’t been a downside to using it yet other than we’ve got to update the programs we create for each change.
This has saved us hundreds of hours of manpower by allowing our automation engineer to rapid fire tests.
We are able to screenshot and save entire sites before and after launch with a program the automation engineer created
We can compare large volumes of data against data in excel docs with a program created using Selenium

Alternatives Considered

We don’t have any alternatives as this product meets our demands.

Other Software Used

Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Likelihood to Recommend

Selenium is perfect for what our company develops. We build landing pages and microsites that will lead to users filling out web forms. We need to test these forms daily and sometimes we have to test for every single state or for every scenario from a drop down. Previously we would have an entire team of people submitting hundreds of leads over the course of a few days to cover these variables. Now we can run thousands of tests in the background while continuing to work on other projects. It may still take hours but we can be less involved with it running.

Users and Roles

3 - Our automation engineer uses Selenium daily to build programs and tools for the QA team so that we can automate some of the more tedious testing procedures. A tool was created that allows us to do high volume testing on several web forms in a few seconds. What would have taken several hours to test has been reduced to minutes for just the post test confirmation testing.

Support Headcount Required

1 - The automation engineer uses java to create programs. A GUI is created so that users with no programming or coding experience can operate the programs. A basic understanding of java is extremely beneficial to me though this depends on the languages used in the business. I'd recommend to non developers to take a udemy or Coursera course on it to be able to read errors in the code itself or in case you need to manually run a program if the gui has a bug.

Business Processes Supported

The number one use case is to submit high volumes of web form leads in rapid succession.
We also use a program to crawl sites and gather information that we can compare against other documents.
A program was created to collect lead data from the backend of our web forms. It compares the results against leads in our CMS and then a user can manually review the report to determine if any leads failed to enter the system.

Innovative Uses

Selenium was initially used by manually creating test cases and building sites for each test type for different sites. It still required a lot of manual work but was the first attempt by the QA team at automation.
When full automation began in our testing we discovered that there were inconsistencies in some of our products which prevented programs from running successfully. This led to us creating standardization of coding so that we could use a single program with 4 test cases for nearly all of our products

Likelihood to Renew

Products Replaced

No - Selenium did not replace any existing product. It was the first automation tool used to eliminate specific manual test cases.

Key Differentiators

Price
Product Features
Product Usability

Product usability was the deciding factor. The automation engineer began as a manual QA tester and once they were shown how we used Selenium recording tool they spent their own time to learn how robust it was. They had free reign to explore and create and found that this tool offered everything they could possibly need in order to write our programs

Support Rating

I have never needed to contact Selenium support

Selenium Customer Support Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Good followup Problems get solved Quick Initial Response	None

Crucial software for high volume testing

Overall Satisfaction with Selenium