What is Selenium?

There are numerous tools that exist in the software industry to address software automation processes. Today we talk about Selenium, a tool that allows you to record, edit and debug test cases that can be automated. These types of tests are currently very common in software development services.

In this post we will review what Selenium is and what this testing program is for within IT projects.

Selenium is a testing environment used to check if the software being developed is working correctly. This tool allows you to: record, edit and debug test cases that can be automated. The most attractive thing about Selenium is that you can edit actions or create them from scratch . This tool also helps a lot in regression testing because it gets automated tests that can then be reused when needed. It began to be developed in 2004 by Jason Huggins and little by little several specialists joined. This software is open source (under Apache 2.0 license ) and can be downloaded and used for free .

What are the main features?

The main features of this software automation tool are:

Actions can be executed point to point.
Contains the autocomplete option when writing code.
It can be referenced to DOM objects: name, ID or with XPath.
Run complex tests that save work time.
It covers checkpoints and extensive debugging.
It allows the storage of the tests carried out in various formats.

What is Selenium used for?

The main objective of Selenium is to verify that the software development solutions are working correctly. The users who work with this tool are QA programmers or QA Engineers, who are dedicated to not only checking that everything works correctly, but also to prevent long-term problems, since that is where the best feature is found. from Selenium .

Today, it contains a set of software tools and each one presents a different perspective. Many programmers decide to apply one or two at the same time to automate projects. Below we show you all the options that Selenium offers and what we can use it for:

Selenium IDE

Selenium IDE allows you to edit, record and debug what is displayed in the browser. It has been designed as a browser extension with support in Firefox and Chrome. Features a command line tool to integrate servers or parallel test runs.

Among its features we find the configuration of breakpoints, debugging functions, support for third-party integration or reusing test cases.

Selenium Remote Control

It is a client/server system that allows you to use the web browser locally or on another computer. One of its advantages is that almost any programming language and testing format can be used.

Selenium WebDriver

Allows you to use a browser locally or remotely. There is no need for a special server, as an instance of the browser is started and can thus be controlled. Any of these languages are supported by Selenium WebDriver: PHP, Java, .Net, Perl, Ruby or Python.

Selenium Grid

Selenium Grid accepts running tests with several browsers at the same time and with different operating systems, for example with Google Chrome or Android. It also significantly reduces the time it takes for a test package to complete. It is an excellent option for large projects, as it saves time.

Conclusions

Selenium is one of the best testing tools today. It is a very advanced tool and allows you to manage almost any need within a custom enterprise software development. Selenium saves time and resources in the long term thanks to its automation.