Testing is crucial for the application development cycle as it allows for finding and fixing bugs in the code before they affect users. It also ensures application quality and stability. It also helps verify that the application functions seamlessly and as intended across different browsers and operating systems.
There are different approaches to testing manually and automated. With the evolving modern web development technologies and frameworks, testing applications manually becomes increasingly complex. Therefore utilizing automated testing solutions is a more popular approach that is taking new heights because it helps to test quickly and efficiently with reusable test suites.
Among many automation testing frameworks testers and developers all over the world leverage Selenium for executing test cases. Selenium is one of the most popular and widely used test automation frameworks. It allows testers to write automated test scripts in various programming languages and run them on many different browsers and operating systems. It has been continuously updated to address web application testing challenges.
In this article, we will discuss the newly added feature in Selenium. We will first start with what Selenium is and what are its components before we do that.
What Is Selenium?
Selenium is one of the most popular test automation frameworks for testing web applications. It is user-friendly, maintainable, and open-source. For quick application development, testers and developers all over the world use Selenium to write excellent reusable automation test scripts in several programming languages, including Python and Java. It has greatly evolved to support widely used operating systems and browsers, including Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.
Also, it is gaining immense popularity because of its newly added features and functionalities making the testing process faster as compared to other tools. Its stability and reliability in automating a wide range of browser-based tests, and its ability to handle complex functions with ease make it more likable among development teams.
Selenium components
Selenium is a suite of tools that consists of three major components:
Selenium IDE- It is a Chrome and Firefox add-on. It allows testers to record and replay the user interactions with the browser
Selenium WebDriver- Selenium WebDriver is a flexible, powerful, and open-source, test automation framework used to automate web browser interaction just like a real user. It supports multiple programming languages, including Java, JavaScript, C#, Python, Perl, etc.
Selenium Grid- Selenium Grid is a vital component of the Selenium test suite. Selenium Grid allows testers to run test scripts across multiple browsers, operating systems, and machines. It also facilitates parallel testing across several devices or virtual machines (VMs), to speed up automated test execution time.
What is new in selenium
Selenium was first introduced into the market as a selenium core, and later on, some extended versions were added. In the previous version of Selenium, there were certain limitations and challenges for testers. The limitations that needed to be improved were managing dynamic web elements, running parallel testing, and managing error handling and debugging capabilities.
However, with the introduction of Selenium’s latest version, these limitations have been confounded. Some of the enhanced features and improved capabilities that have been added to this widely used web automation framework are advanced support for modern web technologies, robust and efficient Selenium Grid for parallel testing, as well as enhanced error handling, and debugging capabilities.
These features in Selenium make it a more valuable tool for testers as it allows them to efficiently automate web application testing and deliver high-quality applications.
Let’s discuss these newly added or advanced features of selenium in detail and how they can benefit automation efforts.
Enhanced Selenium Grid
The earlier version of Selenium Grid was complex to set up and rigid in terms of scaling because it was based on hub and node(s) architecture. The improved Selenium Grid has been enhanced with Docker support, making it easier for developers to set up and scale Selenium Grid by spinning up the lightweight containers rather than users setting up heavy virtual machines, thus making the setup process faster and more cost-effective.
Moreover, it is redesigned in a way that allows QA to manage Selenium Grid easily and smoothly without needing to install and connect hubs and nodes separately every time they want to perform automation testing.
The new Selenium Grid has enhanced flexible, user-friendly UI which can provide information like session capacity, and run time. It allows the execution of the test cases in parallel on multiple operating systems, multiple browsers, and different versions.
Upgraded Selenium IDE
Selenium IDE is a popular record and playback tool. It allows us to interact with browsers. The earlier version of Selenium IDE was available just as a Firefox add-on. But in its newest version, it got deprecated with the latest Firefox version which is available for major web browsers like Firefox, MS Edge, and Chrome. Other more advanced capabilities are
- Improved UI for better user experience.
- The latest version has a SIDE tool, i.e., Selenium IDE runner, allowing QAs to run projects on a node.js platform. This also enables them to run cross-browser tests on local or Cloud Selenium Grid. , thus providing more flexibility in test execution.
- It allows exporting test codes to the desired programming language like Java, C#, Python, .NET, Ruby, and JavaScript, thus giving more flexibility to testers in choosing the language binding that best fits their project requirements.
- Provides reports with information like the total executed number of test cases with execution time, no. of test cases passed, and failed.
Better documentation
The earlier versions of Selenium were lacking in documentation capabilities, users had to face a lot of difficulties in the documentation section. But in the latest versions of Selenium, this has been significantly improved with better documentation capabilities.
This completely revamped version of Selenium has all the official and detailed documentation on Selenium IDE, Selenium WebDriver, and Selenium Grid. This helps testers to easily navigate to the desired section of the page and gain information about all aspects of Selenium required to get started with Selenium testing, including the latest features, best practices, tools, language binding, etc.
Better multiple tabs and Windows management
In test automation, one can work with multiple tabs or windows to perform certain actions. One might need to open a particular link in a new tab or window in a single test flow without creating a new driver object.
To achieve this, in the previous version of Selenium, QAs had to create a new web driver object and then perform the switch operation using the WindowHandle method to perform subsequent steps in that window or tab. But in the latest version, this has been improved as it comes with a new API that allows users to create and switch to a new window/tab without creating a new WebDriver object in the same test session. This makes it easier to handle, and manage multiple windows and tabs in the automation scripts easier.
Modified actions class
The actions class in Selenium is primarily used to simulate input actions from the mouse and keyboard on specific web elements like clicking Left, right-click, double-click, etc. In the latest version of Selenium actions class has been enhanced with new methods for clicking on a certain web element, right-clicking operation, clicking on an element without releasing the click, and double-clicking on web elements, making it easier to perform complex user interactions.
Support for Chrome DevTools protocol
Chrome DevTools is a set of tools for web developers. They have been built directly into the Chrome browser. The updated version of Selenium provides native support for Chrome DevTools protocol through the DevTools interface. It allows QA to use Chrome development properties like fetch, network, profiler, performance, security, application cache, and more. So that they can perform better testing, quickly edit the web pages, and resolve critical bugs in specific web pages to make better websites and deliver them faster.
It also allows QA engineers to leverage the APIs offered by Chrome DevTools to easily simulate poor network conditions like 2G, 3G, 4G, etc, and perform geolocation testing.
WebDriver became W3C Standardization
Another major change in the newest version of Selenium is the standardization of the WebDriver API concerning W3C Protocol, which provides a friendly and flexible API to interact with web browsers, encouraging better compatibility and stability across different browsers.
With this change, any software that follows W3C standards can be integrated with Selenium without any compatibility issues. However, the change in protocol will not impact existing users as almost all major browsers such as Chrome, Safari, and IE are already W3C standard compliant.
Better monitoring and reporting
Logging and debugging capabilities have been improvised to fasten the debugging process, making it easier for QA engineers to diagnose and troubleshoot script issues during test execution.
Utilize LambdaTest to enhance Selenium automation testing need
Considering all the above points, it can be said that the features in Selenium appear quite promising in terms of making the testing process easier, and reliable. However, to get the complete benefits of selenium testing regardless of the Selenium version in use, one must utilize an automation testing platform that is compatible with Selenium.
LambdaTest is an automation testing platform that offers complete support for the Selenium framework and provides all the essential functionality needed for complete test automation of Web, Android, and iOS apps and API testing on a single platform.
LambdaTest is an AI-powered test orchestration and execution platform that allows performing manual and automated testing of mobile and web applications at scale. The platform also allows performing both real-time and automation testing by providing access to an online Selenium grid of more than 3000 environments, real mobile devices, and browsers for accurate test results.
The use of Selenium Grid, in particular, speeds up test execution and advances browser testing by enabling parallel testing and cross-browser compatibility testing against different browsers and different operating systems simultaneously. This enables careful analysis of website performance and obtains greater test coverage in less time.
The LambdaTest integration with Selenium also allows the creation of stable and reliable tests faster with any Selenium code-based framework in multiple languages and running the Selenium test automation scripts on real browsers to scale web application testing confidently and continuously and release high-quality apps with ease.
In case of test failure, LambdaTest AI-driven testing helps to identify other tests that may have been affected and tries to auto-correct those tests and save execution time and cost. Another notable feature of LambdaTest is that it can be seamlessly integrated with popular CI/CD tools like Slack, JIRA, GitHub, Jenkins, etc, to achieve continuous Testing.
Conclusion
It can be concluded that the importance of automation testing is on the rise, and to fulfill this growing demand numerous test automation tools and frameworks are made available in the market. One such widely used framework is Selenium which is widely used by testers across the globe for automating web app testing. Additionally, with its newly updated version, it has gained even more attention.
The major updates in Selenium provide several benefits like seamless integration, parallel testing, cross-browser testing, multi-tabs or Windows support, improved documentation, enhanced GUI, network Interception, etc. making Selenium testing much easier. With this new version of Selenium, testers can improve their automation testing experiences and bring better-quality applications to market faster than ever before.