Hand Shake with Selenium

Lesson 1: Introduction to Selenium

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

Selenium is an open source portable software testing framework for web applications. Selenium provides a record/playback tool for authoring tests without learning a test scripting language (Selenium IDE). It also provides a test domain-specific language (Selenese)[1] to write tests in a number of popular programming languages, including Java, C#, Groovy, Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby. The tests can then be run against most modern web browsers. Selenium can be deployed on Windows, Linux, and Macintosh platforms.

Browser and Operating System Support

Selenium-WebDriver

Selenium-WebDriver supports the following browsers along with the operating systems these browsers are compatible with.

Browser	Operating System
Google Chrome	Windows
Internet Explorer 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 - 32 and 64-bit where applicable	Linux
Firefox: latest ESR, previous ESR, current release, one previous release	Macintosh
Safari
Opera
HtmlUnit
Phantomjs
Android (with Selendroid or appium)
iOS (with ios-driver or appium)

  

Selenium Flavors

Selenium is composed of multiple software tools. Each has a specific role.

Selenium 2 (also known as. 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 objects oriented API as well as an answer to the limitations of the old implementation.

  

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 1’s Selenium RC interface for backwards compatibility.

Selenium 1 (also known as. Selenium RC or Remote Control)

Selenium 1 is still actively supported (mostly in maintenance mode) and provides some features that may not be available in Selenium 2 for a while, including support for several languages (Java, Javascript, Ruby, PHP, Python, Perl and C#) and support for almost every browser out there.

Selenium IDE

Selenium IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is a prototyping tool for building test scripts. It is a Firefox plugin and provides an easy-to-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.

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 slow-running 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.

Selenium Core

Selenium Core (on which RC was based) was essentially a JavaScript application, running inside the browser's security sandbox.

Because Selenium was written in pure JavaScript, its initial design required developers to host Core and their tests on the same server as the application under test (AUT) in order to avoid falling foul of the browser's security policies and the JavaScript sandbox.

Let’s now try to learn the components of Selenium RC and its architecture.

Selenium RC components are:

Ø  The Selenium Server which launches and kills browsers, interprets and runs the Selenese commands passed from the test program, and acts as an HTTP proxy, intercepting and verifying HTTP messages passed between the browser and the AUT.

Ø  Client libraries which provide the interface between each programming language and the Selenium RC Server.

 Selenium RC architecture

Selenium Server

Selenium Server receives Selenium commands from your test program, interprets them, and reports back to your program the results of running those tests.

The RC server bundles Selenium Core and automatically injects it into the browser. This occurs when your test program opens the browser (using a client library API function). Selenium-Core is a JavaScript program, actually a set of JavaScript functions which interprets and executes Selenese commands using the browser’s built-in JavaScript interpreter.

The Server receives the Selenese commands from your test program using simple HTTP GET/POST requests. This means you can use any programming language that can send HTTP requests to automate Selenium tests on the browser.

Lesson 2: Selenium IDE GUI features

Installing Selenium IDE

Selenium IDE can be installed in two different ways. Please find them as explained below:

Method # 1:

Open Firefox browser and navigate to Tools-->Add-ons

 

In the Add-ons Manager tab, search for Selenium IDE (refer to following screenshot)

Click on ‘Install’ button displaying against Selenium IDE Button 1.2.0

After successful downloading the add-on, a message would be displayed to restart Firefox

Click on Restart now and the browser would be restarted to show the Add-on manager

Now, to view the Selenium IDE in the taskbar, navigate to View-->Toolbars-->Customize

  

From the ‘Customize Toolbar’ pop-up, find Selenium IDE icon, drag it on to the toolbar and click on Done button.

The Selenium IDE button can be seen on the toolbar as shown below

Go to http://www.seleniumhq.org/download/ and download the latest version by clicking on the version link. Here in this case, it is 2.5.0

 

 

Firefox will protect you from installing add-ons from unfamiliar locations, so you will need to click ‘Allow’ to proceed with the installation, as shown in the following screenshot. 

When downloading from Firefox, you’ll be presented with the following window.

  

Select Install Now. The Firefox Add-ons window pops up, first showing a progress bar, and when the download is complete, displays the following.

Restart Firefox. After Firefox reboots you will find the Selenium-IDE listed under the Firefox Tools menu.