Why Should Businesses Leverage Selenium Automation Testing?

How do you ensure that your website is offering consistent results and helping your customers engage in this digital age?

Even when you may have already invested a lot in creating a website loaded with detailed features, advanced website testing is the only way to be confident and assured that your website is working as expected in terms of functionality and performance.

Talking more specifically, web application testing is a practice that allows you to identify major issues of the website. Usually, these issues are related to UI (anything that affects user experience), security loopholes (sensitive data exposure, insecure components, etc), and compatibility or performance bottlenecks (compatibility issues, device configuration issues, etc). In addition, test automation provides a powerful framework to implement tests across various browsers and with different forms of data to improve test coverage.

Manual testing used to be a highly time-consuming task for testing websites with rich functionalities, but with the introduction of advanced web testing automation tools like Selenium, it became much easier for test teams to work on repetitive and advanced testing processes.
Before we dig into the details of using Selenium for automation testing, let us quickly run through some of the common benefits of test automation for businesses.

Benefits of Test Automation

1. With test automation, one can detect bugs or problems early on during the development phase. Also, after the early investment on tools and best practices, it could easily increase the productivity and efficiency of the teams. Manual testing, on the other hand, is time-consuming and can feel monotonous when it comes to eliminating a wide variety of errors.
2. Test automation helps you minimize the feedback cycle and provides faster validation options for the development phases of your product. It allows you to test 24/7 and can perform testing from remote-held mobile devices as well.
3. By automating your testing procedure, the team takes less time to continuously test and validate newly developed features. You get to experience a reduced testing cycle and have rapid feedback, which makes it easy to bring products to the market faster. Furthermore, the time saved through automation can be used for improving communication with several departments like design, marketing, or product owners.
4. When using an automated test environment, it becomes easy for companies or businesses to save money because test automation requires fewer resources to test your product, once the initial phase of establishing the process is attained.
5. Automation enables you to spend time writing new tests and implementing them in your automated test suite. This process assists in increasing the test coverage for your product and makes it easy for businesses to achieve a high-quality application when the application’s features are tested thoroughly.
6. Automation testing offers better insights compared to manual testing, especially when any tests fail, including insights into data tables, memory contents, internal program states, file contents, etc., to help developers understand their mistakes and make it possible for them to tackle those challenges intelligently.
7. An automated test suite comes with many performance oriented features. For instance, it helps you simulate thousands of virtual users and lets you interact with your web application to understand its behavior. On the flip side, it is impractical to simulate the user behavior with manual testing, and it is difficult to know how they interact with your web application.
8. Determining the stability of your build is quicker with test automation

Why Leverage Selenium Automation Testing?

Even though there is a wide range of testing tools available in the market that can be used for the automation testing process, Selenium is one of the most preferred and popular open-source testing tools used by experts in the testing industry due to its own unique and numerous features and benefits.

For instance, it has a robust record and playback feature for testing web applications and operates multiple scripts across different browsers such as Mozilla, Firefox, Chrome, IE, and Safari. You can also automate browser testing by using Selenium WebDriver that is also a web framework to automate web-based application testing and create test scripts as per your favorite programming languages.

Furthermore, Selenium automation testing is cost-effective because its testing tools are available free of charge to use for frequent regression testing and to support unlimited iterations of test case execution. Apart from this, a Selenium Testing framework supports Agile-based development methodologies and allows you to prepare custom-based bug reporting. All you have to do is implement IReporter by TestNG to access the generated report method once the entire suite is invoked.

You can also use this tool for database testing by using SQL commands and acquiring as many website application benefits as you need with the system.The benefits of Selenium test automation are also applicable to a wide range of industries–below are some of the key features that businesses could yield with the Selenium automation testing tool.

Open-Source
As discussed above, Selenium is available free of cost. Therefore, it is a highly portable and freeware tool that you can download with the utmost ease with rapid support from its community, in case of downloading or technical issues.

Operating System Support
Selenium supports a wide array of operating systems from Mac, Windows, UNIX, to Linux. Moreover, various Selenium suites of solutions are available on the internet to check or to create test cases, utilizing Windows Operating System, while you can also do the implementation on a Linux-based system.

Language Support
Selenium Automation Testing supports a range of languages, such as Perl, Java, C#, Python, Groovy, JavaScript, Ruby, and more. Based on the developers’ and testers' choice, they can use any of these languages to get the testing done on the business web application.

Constant Updates
Due to community-based Selenium support, one can get constant and easy updates as well as upgrades to utilize this tool in the right way.

Test Across Devices
For mobile web application automation, Selenium Test Automation can be implemented on Android, Blackberry, and iPhone. Besides, this can help you in addressing issues on a continuous basis and producing necessary results.

Reusability & Extra Features
Selenium Test Automation framework prefers scripts for performing testing across multiple browsers. It helps you cover all aspects of functional testing and lets you execute multiple tests in a reusable nature. In addition, it comes with a user-friendly interface to create and execute tests quickly and efficiently. It enables users to use scripts through extensions and gives an opportunity to develop, manipulate the actions through customization at an advanced level.

The Crux

Gone are the days when businesses were only dependent on manual testing. Today is the era of automation software testing where you can leverage the potential of tools like Selenium. Especially when business operations have become highly competitive, using Selenium automation is the best thing you can do to save the test execution time while having the ease to run web applications across different operating systems and browsers.

All in all, with its undeniable benefits, Selenium is arguably the best automation framework for testing web-based applications and fulfilling the most necessary website needs. And, most importantly, it can help you obtain high-quality products and enjoy more readability for testing, especially when you need to write functions for effortless manipulation.