Selenium Tutorial For Beginners | What Is Selenium? | Selenium DevOps | InterviewDOT

Tamil Selenium Tutorial For Beginners | What Is Selenium? | Selenium Automation Testing Tutorial | InterviewDOT

Selenium is an open source tool which is used for automating the tests carried out on web browsers (Web applications are tested using any web browser).

What is Selenium Framework?
So, what actually is the Selenium framework? Simply put, Selenium is a popular automation testing suite which can be used to automate the desktop and mobile web browser interactions. You can perform automation testing by writing code in any of your preferred language supported by Selenium and can easily run your automation scripts to automate testing of an application or a process.

There is more to this than meets the eye. Selenium is not only one framework but rather a set of frameworks bundled into a suite. A toolbox to make the life of a software tester that much easier. It is an essential part when creating robust, browser-based regression automation suites and tests.

When people think of Selenium, they probably think of the Selenium WebDriver, which is understandable as it is the most used tool in the suite. But to fully utilize Selenium and choose the correct tool for the job, it is good to know what parts make up the popular testing system.

Below we will go through the tools in more detail, but the emphasis will lie mostly on the Selenium WebDriver or Selenium 3, if you will, as it is the key interface when driving a browser.

Selenium WebDriver
Selenium WebDriver is a browser-specific driver which helps in accessing and launching the different browsers whether it’s desktop browsers or mobile browsers. That means it does not support for example Windows applications. It provides an interface to write and run automation scripts. Every browser has different drivers to run tests.

Chrome has ChromeDriver, Firefox has GeckoDriver, Safari has SafariDriver and so on, due to the fact that every browser has a different way of performing actions i.e. loading a page.

WebDriver has the capability to test modern and dynamic websites, sites where content is changing dynamically with a click of a button for example. As you will find out later when we go through the architecture, it works by interacting with the browser in more or less the same way as a real user would.

The Selenium WebDriver architecture works in the following way. You write your tests in your preferred programming language, this is communicated in JSON over HTTP (REST API) to the browser-specific driver which then, in turn, instantiate and communicates via HTTP to the browser itself and the browser communicates back with an HTTP response.

Selenium framework is a set of code structure which is used in automation testing. In an automation testing we use tools to convert test data into test scripts. To optimize the code structure for automation testing we use Selenium Framework. This framework is used to make the readability of the code simpler so that it becomes more user friendly. It’s like decoding where you break your large code into smaller, readable codes where every code is assigned a particular function.

There are many benefits of breaking a huge code into multiple small codes. It results in:

Improved Readability
Makes error detection and rectification easy
Higher Portability
Script Maintenance is reduced
Recovery becomes easy in case of losses
Reusability of code