Pros and Cons of Selenium Testing Automation Software

Selenium has proved to be a highly popular test automation tool and organizations have benefitted through this highly efficient tool. Over a span of years, selenium has proved to be a demanding test automation tool because of its key features and huge support. But, though there are a lot of advantages of selenium, there comes disadvantages also. In this article, you will know about the pros and cons of selenium testing automation software.

Pros of selenium:

1. It supports mobile testing: Native, hybrid or web mobile applications can be tested with selenium tool, by just using additional software. Selendroid and Appium can be used based on project specific requirements. These two software tools are fully compatible with selenium. Both appium and selendroid have huge community support and are also open-source. The main difference between the two is that selendroid focuses exclusively on android, while appium focuses on Windows, Android and iOS devices.

2. Selenium supports a wide variety of platforms: Selenium is supported by popular programming languages such as JavaScript, Python, Perl, Ruby, PHP, C#, Java etc. It supports platforms such as iOS, Android, Mac, Linux, Windows and browsers such as Microsoft Edge, Opera, Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer and Google chrome.

3. A huge community: There is a huge online community of selenium enthusiasts that share a huge amount of information pertaining to selenium that can be both learned and applied.

4. Extensive library: Selenium comes with an extensive library of extensions and plugins. Selenium’s standard functionality can be extended with a wide range of plugins. Some of the plugins such as selendroid and appium are officially endorsed by selenium and the unsupported ones can be found on Github. For more in-depth information, just google “Selenium plugins <tool name>” and an extension can be found for easy integration with a programming product such as Eclipse and Jenkins.

 

Cons of selenium:

1. Quite challenging to manage: There are testing scenarios where the amount of test data is huge and it becomes quite difficult to analyze and process. Once the usage of selenium is scaled up, an unmanageable amount of test results should be taken care of, because selenium does not have a proper managing mechanism.

When an automated testing strategy is built around selenium, it becomes obvious to plan accordingly and strategically. To deal with reporting, test management etc., there is a need for extra tools also.

2. Maintenance issues: There is a constant change in code in the DevOps environment. An organization can use techniques and strategies to reduce the effects of codebases that are changing on automated testing. Despite the plan being meticulously prepared, tests are eventually broken down by code changes. This means that it becomes significant to take into consideration test script management.

Infrastructure maintenance needs also to be considered. Working comprehensively with the selenium grid may not work in all the testing scenarios. There need to be alternate workable solutions provided by the specific teams.

3. Lack of reporting capabilities: Selenium is considered to be a great tool when it comes to creating, automating and executing tests. But, when it comes to test creation and test reporting like CI dashboards, cross-platform comparison, HAR file generation, video recording etc., selenium lacks efficiency from an implementation point of view.

Conclusion: If you are looking forward to implementing selenium testing for your specific project, then do get connected with a globally renowned software testing services company that will provide you with highly effective testing solutions that are precisely in line with your project specific requirements.

About the author: I am a technical content writer focused on writing technology specific articles. I strive to provide well-researched information on the leading market savvy technologies.