Automation Testing Basics - Introduction

Introduction
Test Automation for Web Applications

Many, perhaps most, software applications today are written as webbased applications to be run in an Internet browser. The effectiveness of
testing these applications varies widely among companies and
organizations. In an era of highly interactive and responsive software
processes where many organizations are using some form of Agile
methodology, test automation is frequently becoming a requirement for
software projects. Test automation is often the answer. Test automation
means using a software tool to run repeatable tests against the
application to be tested. For regression testing this provides that
responsiveness.
There are many advantages to test automation. Most are related to the
repeatability of the tests and the speed at which the tests can be
executed. There are a number of commercial and open source tools
available for assisting with the development of test automation.
Selenium is possibly the most widely-used open source solution. This
users guide will assist both new and experienced Selenium users in
learning effective techniques in building test automation for web
applications.
This users guide introduces Selenium, teaches its features, and
presents commonly used best practices accumulated from the Selenium
community. Many examples are provided. Also, technical information on
the internal structure of Selenium and recommended uses of Selenium
are provided.
Test automation has specific advantages for improving the long-term
efficiency of a software teams testing processes. Test automation
supports:
Frequent regression testing

Rapid feedback to developers
Virtually unlimited iterations of test case execution
Support for Agile and extreme development methodologies
Disciplined documentation of test cases
Customized defect reporting
Finding defects missed by manual testing
To Automate or Not to Automate?

Is automation always advantageous? When should one decide to
automate test cases?
It is not always advantageous to automate test cases. There are times
when manual testing may be more appropriate. For instance, if the
applications user interface will change considerably in the near future,
then any automation might need to be rewritten anyway. Also,
sometimes there simply is not enough time to build test automation. For
the short term, manual testing may be more effective. If an application
has a very tight deadline, there is currently no test automation
available, and its imperative that the testing get done within that time
frame, then manual testing is the best solution.
Introducing Selenium
Selenium is a set of different software tools each with a different
approach to supporting test automation. Most Selenium QA Engineers
focus on the one or two tools that most meet the needs of their project,
however learning all the tools will give you many different options for
approaching different test automation problems. The entire suite of tools
results in a rich set of testing functions specifically geared to the needs
of testing of web applications of all types. These operations are highly
flexible, allowing many options for locating UI elements and comparing
expected test results against actual application behavior. One of
Seleniums key features is the support for executing ones tests on
multiple browser platforms.
Brief History of The Selenium Project

Selenium first came to life in 2004 when Jason Huggins was testing an
internal application at ThoughtWorks. Being a smart guy, he realized
there were better uses of his time than manually stepping through the
same tests with every change he made. He developed a Javascript
library that could drive interactions with the page, allowing him to
automatically rerun tests against multiple browsers. That library
eventually became Selenium Core, which underlies all the functionality
of Selenium Remote Control (RC) and Selenium IDE. Selenium RC was
ground-breaking because no other product allowed you to control a
browser from a language of your choice.
While Selenium was a tremendous tool, it wasnt without its drawbacks.
Because of its Javascript based automation engine and the security
limitations browsers apply to Javascript, different things became
impossible to do. To make things worse, webapps became more and
more powerful over time, using all sorts of special features new
browsers provide and making this restrictions more and more painful.
In 2006 a plucky engineer at Google named Simon Stewart started work
on a project he called WebDriver. Google had long been a heavy user of
Selenium, but testers had to work around the limitations of the product.
Simon wanted a testing tool that spoke directly to the browser using the
native method for the browser and operating system, thus avoiding the
restrictions of a sandboxed Javascript environment. The WebDriver
project began with the aim to solve the Selenium pain-points.
Jump to 2008. The Beijing Olympics mark Chinas arrival as a global
power, massive mortgage default in the United States triggers the worst
international recession since the Great Depression, The Dark Knight is
viewed by every human (twice), still reeling from the untimely loss of
Heath Ledger. But the most important story of that year was the
merging of Selenium and WebDriver. Selenium had massive community
and commercial support, but WebDriver was clearly the tool of the
future. The joining of the two tools provided a common set of features
for all users and brought some of the brightest minds in test automation
under one roof. Perhaps the best explanation for why WebDriver and
Selenium are merging was detailed by Simon Stewart, the creator of
WebDriver, in a joint email to the WebDriver and Selenium community
on August 6, 2009.
Why are the projects merging? Partly because WebDriver addresses
some shortcomings in selenium (by being able to bypass the JS
sandbox, for example. And weve got a gorgeous API), partly because
selenium addresses some shortcomings in WebDriver (such as
supporting a broader range of browsers) and partly because the main
selenium contributors and I felt that it was the best way to offer users
the best possible framework.
Seleniums Tool Suite

Selenium is composed of multiple software tools. Each has a specific
role.
Selenium 2 (aka. Selenium WebDriver)
Selenium 2 is the future direction of the project and the newest addition
to the Selenium toolkit. This brand new automation tool provides all
sorts of awesome features, including a more cohesive and object
oriented API as well as an answer to the limitations of the old
implementation.
As you can read in Brief History of The Selenium Project, both the
Selenium and WebDriver developers agreed that both tools have
advantages and that merging the two projects would make a much
more robust automation tool.
Selenium 2.0 is the product of that effort. It supports the WebDriver API
and underlying technology, along with the Selenium 1 technology
underneath the WebDriver API for maximum flexibility in porting your
tests. In addition, Selenium 2 still runs Selenium 1s Selenium RC
interface for backwards compatibility.
Selenium 1 (aka. Selenium RC or Remote Control)
As you can read in Brief History of The Selenium Project, Selenium RC

was the main Selenium project for a long time, before the
WebDriver/Selenium merge brought up Selenium 2, the newest and
more powerful tool.
Now Selenium 1 is deprecated and is not actively supported (mostly in
maintenance mode).
Selenium IDE
Selenium IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is a prototyping

tool for building test scripts. It is a Firefox plugin and provides an easyto-use interface for developing automated tests. Selenium IDE has a
recording feature, which records user actions as they are performed and
then exports them as a reusable script in one of many programming
languages that can be later executed.
Note
Even though Selenium IDE has a Save feature that allows users to
keep the tests in a table-based format for later import and execution,
it is not designed to run your test passes nor is it designed to build all
the automated tests you will need. Specifically, Selenium IDE doesnt
provide iteration or conditional statements for test scripts. At the time of
writing there is no plan to add such thing. The reasons are partly
technical and partly based on the Selenium developers encouraging best
practices in test automation which always requires some amount of
programming. Selenium IDE is simply intended as a rapid
prototyping tool. The Selenium developers recommend for serious,
robust test automation either Selenium 2 or Selenium 1 to be used with
one of the many supported programming languages.
Selenium-Grid
Selenium-Grid allows the Selenium RC solution to scale for large test

suites and for test suites that must be run in multiple environments.
Selenium Grid allows you to run your tests in parallel, that is, different
tests can be run at the same time on different remote machines. This
has two advantages. First, if you have a large test suite, or a slowrunning test suite, you can boost its performance substantially by using
Selenium Grid to divide your test suite to run different tests at the same
time using those different machines. Also, if you must run your test
suite on multiple environments you can have different remote machines
supporting and running your tests in them at the same time. In each
case Selenium Grid greatly improves the time it takes to run your suite
by making use of parallel processing.
Choosing Your Selenium Tool

Many people get started with Selenium IDE. If you are not already
experienced with a programming or scripting language you can use
Selenium IDE to get familiar with Selenium commands. Using the IDE
you can create simple tests quickly, sometimes within seconds.
We dont, however, recommend you do all your test automation using
Selenium IDE. To effectively use Selenium you will need to build and run
your tests using either Selenium 2 or Selenium 1 in conjunction with one
of the supported programming languages. Which one you choose
depends on you.
At the time of writing the Selenium developers are planning on the
Selenium-WebDriver API being the future direction for Selenium.
Selenium 1 is provided for backwards compatibility. Still, both have
strengths and weaknesses which are discussed in the corresponding
chapters of this document.
We recommend those who are completely new to Selenium to read
through these sections. However, for those who are adopting Selenium
for the first time, and therefore building a new test suite from scratch,
you will probably want to go with Selenium 2 since this is the portion of
Selenium that will continue to be supported in the future.
Supported Browsers and Platforms

In Selenium 2.0, the supported browsers vary depending on whether
you are using Selenium-WebDriver or Selenium-RC.
Selenium-WebDriver
Selenium-WebDriver supports the following browsers along with the

operating systems these browsers are compatible with.
Google Chrome
Internet Explorer 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 - 32 and 64-bit where applicable
Firefox: latest ESR, previous ESR, current release, one previous
release
Safari
Opera
HtmlUnit
phantomjs
Android (with Selendroid or appium)
iOS (with ios-driver or appium)

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Introduction

Test Automation for Web Applications

Frequent regression testing

To Automate or Not to Automate?

Brief History of The Selenium Project

Seleniums Tool Suite

As you can read in Brief History of The Selenium Project, Selenium RC

Selenium IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is a prototyping

Selenium-Grid allows the Selenium RC solution to scale for large test

Choosing Your Selenium Tool

Supported Browsers and Platforms

Selenium-WebDriver supports the following browsers along with the

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