Selenium is now 14 years old. It was developed in 2004 by Jason Huggins as a tool that helps developers with some internal projects. Many things have evolved in Selenium since then. Selenium automation testing toolset made something new that was earlier tough and fragile- automation of tests inside a browser. This latest automation testing tool is more useful than yesterday. The changes introduced by experts in Selenium also had the side effect of building a community of open source and commercial tools.
Selenium is the banner for open-source projects set. Selenium IDE is a Firefox plugin that records and saves user actions and lets you play them back, but in Firefox only without loops or other programming structures. The tests of Selenium IDE are easy click-click inspection routines. Developers can export code to Selenium WebDriver with this tool. Learning Selenium IDE is not a science, not very robust, and offers a simple upgrade to something stronger.
But this Selenium WebDriver has its limits!
You should know that Selenium only does browser automation and nothing else. You cannot run existing Windows apps like Excel and Word in a browser. It implies WebDriver will not be able to see or communicate with them. It is due to the way WebDriver works - it manipulates web pages within the browser with the same engine that we use for interpreting web pages.
Operating system click events are hidden from the view of Selenium.
Selenium Gets an Update and Upgraded to 3.0
The most widely used AI-based Software testing tool, Selenium, was updated to Selenium 3.0, or you may say version 3.0, in October 2016. Selenium software is an open-source software testing tool. Generally, five components make Selenium software an open-source tool, and they include – Selenium IDE, Selenium Client API, Selenium RC, Selenium WebDriver, and Selenium Grid. Jason Huggins released the first version, i.e., Selenium 1.0, back in 2004. The software was quite impressive and used by many developers. The 2nd version, Selenium 2.0, was an upgrade made by merging Selenium WebDriver with Selenium 1.0.
Originally, Selenium had one more component named Selenium Core, and the working of Selenium depended on it. The removal of dependency of Selenium Core led to the upgrade of Selenium 3.0. Also, the JavaScript framework of Selenium was very complex and had numerous limitations, which also made Selenium Core displeasing. In addition to removing Selenium Core and Javascript, the Selenium 3.0 had many other advantages and features like no requirement for Firefox Driver, etc. Selenium 3.0 regularly gets updates online, and the latest update was released on 17 Aug 2018, which is Selenium 3.14.0. There have been a lot of anticipations in the community about the latest release and how it will affect the working culture.
Is there anything new in Selenium?
Selenium Automation Testing is getting updated frequently and coming with some new features. Teams and Experts have recently made a few changes and added native events support in the latest version (Firefox 24, 31, 32, and 33). Native events are the signals that your browser sends to the computer system when you are working, such as when you are doing typing, performing mouse clicks and scrolling, etc. Usually, these things happen when a person is making use of a browser. But with automation, it is slightly different.
1. Support for IE
If you are using the latest Internet Explorer 11, luck is at your side. Internet Explorer officials have developed a set of webdriver bindings named InternetExplorerdrivers. With the official support for IE, developers can now focus on one single tool and can bring the missing feature on WebDriver. It is a big feature introduced by experts.
2. Visual Automation testing
Visual inspection of pages and seeing changes between builds has been harder. In earlier times, developers would have to navigate to every page in their app or minimum they could remember, click the button or run the script for their visual tool to do some recordings of DOM and CSS elements. This recording works as your benchmark.
Some tools will take advantage of the Selenium scripts that we already use for testing software. These tools will follow along with the scripts instead of having a separate pass-through on each screen. It takes a digital snapshot of every page on which the script lands. While running the scripts again, every snapshot is compared to the website preview.
3. What does it bring for software testers?
Many good things are happening for software testers in Selenium. Software testers would no longer be blamed for defects in production. Software testers will get a 23% hike by 2020. Voice Automation Tool for Windows and Web Applications can create an automation suite as developers speak of application use cases. This tool supports recording tests in 17 spoken languages of a human. It can comprehend results for the sake of others.
4. Testers need to learn to combine skills
A desire for new skills and flexibility is already required. Today, we are incorporating testing into different roles or starting to learn tester skill sets. It is now more complex and not just a single function. Companies are interested in a broader swath of skill sets related to the development and seeking the same in their testers.
Not everyone is positive about the evolvement of testers into mini data scientists. Excess focus on code testing has left the production unit too dependent on the chance to work. Testers could be determining and finding out what they need to test.
For more updates on selenium automation testing, you can read blogs of selenium experts online. You can give feedback for this post through your comments.
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