Introduction to Selenium | Selenium Webdriver Online Course

Selenium and Selenium Webdriver

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 Selenium’s key features is the support for executing one’s tests on multiple browser platforms.

Selenium is a test tool for web applications.
Selenium tests run directly in a browser.
Runs on Windows, Linux, and Macintosh.
Runs in Internet Explorer, Mozilla and Firefox.
Enables Browser Compatibility Testing.
Enables System Functional Testing.

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 don’t, 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 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11 on appropriate combinations of Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1. As of April 15 2014, IE 6 is no longer supported. The driver supports running 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the browser 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)

It involves the following topics