Introduction

Introduction

Selenium is an open source and a portable automated software testing tool for testing web applications that has capabilities to operate across different browsers and operating systems. Selenium is just NOT a single tool but a set of tools that helps testers to automate web based applications more efficiently.

Let us now understand each one of those tools in the selenium suite and its uses. We will look at eac

Tool
Selenium IDE: Selenium Integrated Development Environment (IDE) is a Firefox plugin that lets testers to allows testers to record their actions as they follow the workflow that they need to test.
Selenium RC: Selenium Remote Control(RC) was the flagship testing framework that allowed more than simple browser actions and linear execution.It makes use of the full power of programming languages such as Java,C#,PHP,Python,Ruby and PERL to create more complex tests.
Selenium WebDriver: Selenium WebDriver is the successor to Selenium RC which sends commands directly to the browser and retrieves results.
Selenium Grid: Selenium Grid is a tool used to run parallel tests across different machines and different browsers simultaneously which results in minimized execution time.

Selenium Advantages

QTP and Selenium are the most used tools in the market for software automation testing purposes. Hence it is making more sense to now compare the pros of selenium over QTP/UFT.

Selenium

Selenium is an Open source tool.

Can be extended for various technologies which exposes DOM.

Has capabilities to execute the scripts across different browsers.

Can execute scripts on various Operating Systems.

Supports mobile devices.

Executes tests within the browser, so focus is NOT required while script execution in progress.

QTP

QTP is a Commercial tool and cost involved in each one of the license.

Limited Add-ons and needs Add-ons for each one of those technologies.

Can run tests in specific versions of Firefox ,IE and Chrome.

Works only with Windows.

Supports mobile devices with the help of third party tools.

Needs Focus during script execution as the tool acts on the browser(mimics user actions)

QTP cannot execute tests in parallel but integrating QTP with QC allows testers to execute in parallel. QC is also a commercial tool.

Selenium Disadvantages

Let us now discuss the pitfalls of selenium over QTP.

Selenium

Supports only Web Based Applications.

No Feature such as Object Repository/Recovery Scenario

No IDE so the script development won't be as fast as QTP.

Cannot access controls within the browser

No Default test report generation.

For Parameterization, users has to rely on the programming language

QTP

Can test both Web and desktop applications.

QTP has OR and Recovery Scenarios built-in.

More Intuitive IDE, Automation can be achieved faster.

Can access controls within the browser such as favorites bar, backward and forward buttons.

Default test result generation within the tool.

Parameterization is builtin and easy to implement.

Selenium - IDE

The Selenium-IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is an easy-to-use Firefox plug-in for develop Selenium test cases. It provides a Graphical User Interface for recording user actions using Firefox which is used to learn and use Selenium, but it can only be used only with Firefox browser as other browsers are not supported.

However, The recorded scripts can be converted into various programming languages supported by Selenium and the scripts can be executed on various other browsers as well.