To keep pace with not only the demands of the users, but also industry standards, the modern software development cycle requires speed and efficiency at every step. In organizations across the globe, testers, developers, and Quality Assurance specialists are well aware of the benefits of test automation.
Using automation to test software reduces the complexity of the process and eliminates errors. In many parts of the world, Selenium is one of the most widely used tools for test automation. Your web applications are automated tested using Selenium to ensure they work on various operating systems and browsers.
Since Selenium is widely used, it also is prone to many errors. Almost all the errors are fixable. In this article, we will look at such testing mistakes that can compromise the reputation of your organization,
What is Selenium Automation Testing?
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Known as the de facto product in quality assurance, Selenium is an open-source software testing automation tool suite. Many large-scale organizations like Netflix, HubSpot, Google,Fitbit, and many more use Selenium in production, as it supports a variety of programming languages, operating systems, and browsers. Different testing problems and needs can be met with the whole suite.
A JavaScript framework designed by Jason Huggins in 2004 was created to relieve its creator of repetitive manual testing. A product, initially titled JavaScriptTestRunner, enabled users to run tests in a browser, interact with the page, and rerun them without manual intervention. In 2006, Huggins made Selenium Remote Control open-source and made it available to everyone in the world. Innovating feature about the tool was that testers could use their favorite programming language to communicate with the browser.
Benefits Of Selenium
The Selenium framework encourages testers to write scripts that can run on multiple browser platforms using the same programming language. All browsers will automatically support Selenium since WebDriver is becoming part of W3C standards.
Testing user interface modules is one of the most interesting aspects of this tool, since it leverages testers, gives testers a large selection of options for testing, compares the results, and checks if the results are consistent with expected application behavior. A Selenium test script can be translated into an understandable format using the “SENDKEYS” method.
Although Selenium offers a variety of benefits, here are a few of the main ones:
- Test scripts need not be written for every platform to be tested, which saves the software tester’s time. In addition, it runs on any platform since there is only one test script to write.
- Time-to-market and product delivery schedules are missed when manual testing is performed because the testing process is very painful and uncertain. Overall project costs are increased as a result. Testers do not have to write test scripts for each platform with Selenium. By doing this particular process, we would able to save time and eliminate the need for regression testing. As a result, the testing time is optimized and the time to complete the testing is shortened.
- Agile and transparent teamwork is essential throughout the SDLC process for developers, quality assurance, clients, operations, and management.
- The modern agile-enablers of software development are continuous integration and continuous delivery. With Selenium automated tests, organizations can nurture their efforts in Continuous Integration (CI) practice by encouraging the use of Selenium in their testing processes.
- It improves turnaround time by automating the running of multiple test cases on multiple platforms on Selenium framework. By ensuring extreme testing quality, the turnaround time is reduced.
- Selenium offers great visibility for end-to-end application testing
- Various tools such as ExtentReports, Appium, Sikuli, and so on are available for integration with Selenium with Java. By integrating Selenium with these jars, testers can extend its functionalities to new frontiers:
- Integrating Selenium with “ExtentReports” can generate graphs and reports that provide clients with deeper insight into testing status.
- Appium and Selenium can be integrated to test Android and iOS web applications.
- Testing web applications with Selenium and Sikuli allows you to use videos and images as inputs.
9 Common Selenium Testing Mistakes That Can Hurt Your Reputation and Business
In this part of the blog, we will take a look at some of the mistakes that can hurt the reputation of your organization. Please, read!
1. Cross Browser Testing
It is possible that your website may not work properly in Firefox but work fine in Chrome, depending on the browser. It might not be possible to automate testing on all browsers nowadays due to the variety of browsers available.
Despite this, we must still verify that the application under test works correctly with most common browsers, including Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari, and IE. It may be necessary to test on widely used versions of these browsers, as well as systems and resolutions that differ from those commonly used. Testing automation is challenging for testers with this strategy, which is usually referred to as Cross Browser Testing.
2. Synchronizing Events
Automation script failures are primarily caused by sync issues. Synchronization issues can arise when we expect to observe some event. Our test case may fail if it gets delayed or does not happen for some unknown reason. During an automation script, we expect a prompt asking us to accept or decline cookies to appear just after the website is launched, but this prompt got delayed, or it never appeared. Our test script fails due to this type of synchronization.
In Selenium, we generally use implicit waits and explicit waits to handle this.
3. Pop up and Alert Handling
A web application may display various types of pop-ups and alerts. Here is a list of a few:
- Notifications at the browser level may include; “Allow/Decline camera access,” “Allow/Decline microphone access,” etc. Browsers handle these notifications differently depending on how they handle them. ChromeOptions can be used for the Chrome browser. For Firefox, you can use FirefoxOptions/FirefoxProfile.
- In web-based notifications, examples include: “This site says…,” “Is this site for you?” etc. Selenium provides several methods for handling alerts, such as accept() and dismiss(), in its predefined class “Alerts.”.
- Handling OS level pop-ups is not possible with Selenium since its capabilities are only limited to web interaction. Such pop-ups are considered flash objects that cannot be accessed by Selenium Locators.Robot” class is commonly used for interacting with such pop-ups.
4. Managing dynamic elements
Dynamic content might be part of new websites that use high-tech techniques. Geo-located content might even be present on sites accessible globally.
An e-commerce application such as Amazon, for instance, changes its catalog over time and reacts differently in different regions based on its content. Since we are using locators that don’t interact with web elements, automating such web applications becomes challenging with Selenium. There are times when AJAX-based web content takes a while to load, which can also lead to script failures. Fortunately, Selenium includes waits like Implicit wait and Explicit wait that can be useful in such cases. In addition to handling dynamic web content, we can also create custom XPaths.
5. Results that are false positive and also false negative
A nightmare for automation testers has always been False Positive and False Negative results. False Positives occur when our test cases fail when the application under test works properly. Contrary to false-positive results, false-negative results occur when we get passing results for our test cases, but the application under test contains bugs.
QA and development teams are misled by flakiness, and a communication gap is created between them. Automated testers face a challenge when it comes to handling flaky tests.
Managing the test plans, test cases, and testing environment in an organized and appropriate manner is the key to overcoming this flakiness.
6. Scalability
Scalability is one of the major challenges in automating tests. The need to run tests on different browsers, operating systems, and resolutions was discussed in the previous point. It is not possible to perform Cross Browser Testing with Selenium WebDriver since it allows us to run tests sequentially. Test cases may become a hassle if the application under test contains multiple features, resulting in more test cases.
The Selenium Grid has overcome this by allowing us to test our web applications on a variety of combinations of browsers and operating systems. Cross Browser Testing is only possible with Selenium Grid on the physical machines or browsers that we have, making it challenging for testers to run automation tests on a large scale.
7. OTP as well as captcha handling
The values of Captcha and OTP are different every time it is generated, so we cannot assume or predict their values. Automation testers find it challenging to automate features that require Captcha and OTP, such as payment gateways and new account registration. The fact that manual testing cannot be avoided also proves that an application cannot be completely automated.
8. Reporting with limitations
Reporting is an essential part of the testing process. Developers and testers communicate through test reports. There aren’t a lot of reporting capabilities in Selenium as of yet.
Automated testers face a critical challenge: generating and maintaining reports.
Our code designs and reporting are generally based on frameworks based on programming languages. Reports are provided by Java frameworks like TestNG and Gauge. In a similar way, Python can be tested with Pytest.
9. Restricting to only desktop browser testing
Selenium is without a doubt one of the most widely used testing frameworks for web applications. Tested native mobile applications and mobile web applications cannot be run on it, however. “Appium,” or cousin of Selenium, is another open-source framework for this purpose. Android mobile as well as iOS apps, as well as web apps, can be tested using Appium. Automated testers are challenged here because they have to create different drivers and scripts to test web applications on desktops and mobiles while working for a software testing company.
Summing up!
Automation testing of web applications is widely performed using Selenium today. However, it has some limitations and challenges for developers and testers who use Selenium for automation testing, despite some of its remarkable features, such as being a free and open-source framework. Have you ever wondered if Selenium automation testing can solve all these issues? That’s right!
Selenium Automation Grids provide a scalable, secure, and reliable environment for automating tests. With Selenium scripts, you can automate cross-browser testing across 3000+ browsers and platforms, resulting in a greater level of test coverage and significantly shorter build times. Your web application will perform better with LambdaTest when accessed through a variety of browsers.
With LambdaTest Tunnel, it is possible to run automated cross-browser tests on localized web pages. Furthermore, you could run a single test across multiple browsers and operating systems simultaneously. You can use this post to quickly get started with the LambdaTest Selenium automation grid to run your automation scripts.
