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The holy grail to front end automation - Selenium
January 10, 2022

The holy grail to front end automation - Selenium

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Selenium

We used to use most aspects of Selenium (WebDriver and grid) when we had everything in-house, but we then outsourced the grid part to SauceLabs as they offered VMs and real devices. Selenium is the main "go-to" for all things front end in regards to testing. We use Selenium WebDriver to interact with our games via a desktop and mobile device browser where the main use case for us is to execute Javascript code. This is because our games hide behind a canvas object so would need hooks embedded within the games in order to interact with them. A typical use case would be to interact with HTML elements on a webpage. Executing Javascript through the webdriver is instantaneous. There is very little "travel" time for the requests and responses whereby even testing dynamic things like games is possible. It's not interacting with the games as a normal user would with tap/click events, but its the closest you're going to get without using image recognition software.
  • Easy interaction and manipulation of HTML elements.
  • Injection of Javascript code into any browser.
  • Easy to setup and scale Selenium Grid.
  • The ongoing maintenance of Selenium Grid (devices/browsers tend to go down here and there and would require a restart or fix).
  • Constant updates and name changes to the desired capabilities and no official documentation listing them and their constant changes.
  • Javascript execution/injection.
  • Can be used by Java and Javascript programming languages.
  • Simultaneous browser execution.
  • Manual testing is kept to a minimum now with a 70/30 ratio which is the most time-consuming when it comes to testing.
  • Most of the manual testing is now exploratory where edge cases could be performed more.
  • A 33% drop in headcount for manual QAs. In the team, instead of needing 3 QAs, only 2 are needed now with automation experience.
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.

Do you think Selenium delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Selenium's feature set?

Yes

Did Selenium live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Selenium go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Selenium again?

Yes

Selenium is one of the few tools on the market that allows interaction with a browser that is open-source, so it would be really hard to fault/beat it. It's actually available to use in many languages (like Java, Javascript, Python, etc.), so it does cater to many out there. The use case is simple, but powerful, "to imitate a real user interacting with a webpage". This opens up so much in regards to Front end automation and will automate many of your test cases which you would normally manually perform, in a much slower and error-prone way. In addition, you could write scripts to act as tools, if say an API isn't exposed to you. For example, you could create scripts to register an account on a website with different randomised usernames each time. So not just limited to testing. The only downside is that Selenium could hit a scenario where it becomes stuck, then it will crash and require you to debug where it went wrong. But this is more down to the logic of the scripts rather than Selenium itself. You would need to know your product well to cater to these scenarios as Selenium won't handhold you to why things crash/fail.