Let us understand the Basic terminology associated with Automation testing before learning about Selenium. Test engineers struggle hard to deliver a quality product prior to the software product is release to the market. Even with the most outstanding manual testing practices, there is always a chance for defect leakage. Automation Testing is the best method to increase the speed, effectiveness, efficiency, and coverage of your testing.

Automation Testing

In Automation testing, dedicated tools are used specifically to perform automation testing without any human interference. Automation testing tools can retrieve test data, controls execution of tests and evaluates the actual result against expected result. As a result, detailed test report generated for the system under test.

Automation Testing covers both Functional and non-functional tests on an application -

• Functional Automation is used to automate the functional test cases. Ex:- Regression tests, which are repetitive in nature.
• Performance Automation is used to automate non- functional performance tests .Ex:- measuring the performance of an application under considerable load.

Automation Testing tools which are used for functional Automation -

• Auto It, open source.
• Coded UI, by Microsoft.
• Quick Test Professional, by HP.
• Rational Robot, by IBM.
• Selenium, open source.

Automation Testing tools which are used for non-functional Automation -

• Load Runner, by HP.
• JMeter, by HP.
• Burpsuite, by Portswigger.
• Acunetix, by Acunetix.

Why Automation Testing?

There are so many Advantages of Automation Testing.

• Though the Automation tools are very expensive for small organizations, it is considered to be beneficial for big software organizations.
• Automation testing tools have the feature to record and playback the pre-defined actions.
• Automation testing tools are often used for Regression testing.
• They provide quick feedback to developers.
• They provide unlimited iterations of test case execution.
• They provide proper documentation for test cases.
• Automated tests generate customized defect reports.
• Less error prone when compared to manual.

How Selenium relates to Automation testing?

• Selenium has webdriver and IDE as the integration tools to perform different kinds of testing.
• Selenium IDE allows the user to record, edit and replay the HTML- encoded scripts that trigger user interactions with the web application.
• Selenium Webdriver is used to perform API testing. Webdriver API enables development of UI tests through languages like C#, Java, perl, Ruby, Python etc.
• Selenium Webdriver supports cocomplex scenarios which require full automated UI tests.