What makes Selenium such a hot favorite Automation Tool among Enterprises?

Category: Selenium Posted:Mar 03, 2017 By: Serena Josh

What makes Selenium such a hot favorite Automation Tool among Enterprises?

Selenium is very lightweight and developer-friendly tool for automating web applications. It is an open-source tool that gives you the freedom to choose from an array of programming languages like C#, Groovy, Java, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby and Scala and can be used in any OS environment such as Windows, Linux, and OS X.

Originally developed by Jason Huggins in 2004, Selenium has come a long way from its initial stages and has become one of the most searched skill sets.

Automated testing is gradually replacing manual processes as it has become exponentially efficient, provides test coverage in a short span of time and is cost efficient. Selenium as paving way for the increasing popularity of Automated testing as more and more organizations are migrating to Selenium.

According to a research by Transparency Market Research (TMR), the market for test automation valued at 12.91 billion USD in 2015 is expected to skyrocket to 85.84 billion USD by 2024. The test automation market is forecasted to become a lucrative job profile in the coming years, making Selenium an excellent choice of skill set for professionals to have.

Components of Selenium:

Components of Selenium

Selenium consists of several components, each playing a specific role in the development of web applications. They are as follows:

  • Selenium IDE – Used for playback, record, debugging and editing Selenium scripts.
  • Selenium Grid – Used for minimizing test execution times by facilitating distribution of tests across different browsers and machines, for parallel execution of the tests to be carried out
  • Selenium Remote Control – Utilized for running tests on various systems and browsers.
  • Selenium WebDriver – This is the latest version of Selenium and contains a number of Selenium APIs.

We know that Selenium is a popular choice when it comes to automation, let’s look at how popular and what makes it so popular.

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Selenium – Why is it the lord of the Automation Tools?

There is a huge number of reasons as to why Selenium is so popular. Let’s look at some of the major reasons for its success to begin with:

  • In Selenium, the tests can be coded in any number of programming languages and can be run straight away in web browsers and across various operating systems.
  • The second reason is quite simple; the simpler the automation tool, the easier it is to use them. This is an essential feature for easy and increased adoption.
  • Its proficient user interface meets 90% of the prerequisites of web application testers and Document Object Model (DOM) level testing.
  • The extensibility and flexibility features makes it easy for it to run on multiple browsers.
  • Can be coded in Object Oriented Programming languages like Java, .NET, Ruby, Perl, PHP, Python, etc.
  • Provides excellent options for using IDEs based on the chosen development languages.
  • Can run multiple tests simultaneously and allows parallel execution.
  • Contains GUI driving library and can support Multiple Testing Frameworks.
  • Selenium can be combine along with the features related to other frameworks for an impeccable and richer web application user-experience.
  • Diminishes errors caused by humans and improves accuracy.
  • Selenium’s developer community is huge and is backed by Google.
  • Selenium can be integrated with other widely used tools like QMetry, Jenkins and Hudson.
  • It allows flawless integration with the existing set of tools.

The above reasons more make it a preferred choice for many testers.

How popular is Selenium?

How popular is Selenium

Selenium is rapidly emerging as one of the most widely used test automation tools and as a result, has gained enormous popularity. Gartner also reports that Selenium being an open-source automated testing tool has a high adoption rate. More and more organizations are using Selenium as a single test automation solution or as a part of 3 to 4 tools.

Learn Selenium From Industry Experts

Open-source tools are much more popular than 3rd party tools. This is one of the reasons behind Selenium’s success. According to a survey done by TestProject, the test automation is a key factor when it comes to software quality and R&D cost saving.

Automation Tools Type

 

Here’s an excerpt of the survey result on open-source tools: “As much as 88% are using open source tools with internally developed frameworks, as some of those companies are expected to grow within the next several years. If this trend will continue in the current pace, it’s quite possible that 3rd party tools will disappear completely within the next few years.”

Automation Tools - Usage

 

The in-depth analysis of testing approaches and segmentation by technology based on the open source tools shed light on the fact that Selenium was the most widely used automation tool. And that it was also used along with other tools. It is common for most organizations to use three or even four automation tools. In accordance with the surveyed organization, it’s possible that they are using the 3rd party tools for legacy and switching to open source rapidly.

A further drill down of the result has verified the following results.
Web – functional testing 48%, Mobile – applications testing 18% and Unit & API testing – 34%.

Testing - Usage

 

Conclusion:

Selenium has emerged as an effective testing tool since its advent in 2004. The rapid scale of development is keeping the testers on their toes, making it necessary for them to continuously strive to keep up and upgrade their skills. Selenium being an open-source tool and highly efficient is opted by many organizations of all size, making it a valuable skill to possess.

You may also like to read: Top 10 Selenium interview questions to prepare

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