Want to see Parasoft in action? Sign up for our Monthly Demos! See Demos & Events >>
X
Want to see Parasoft in action? Sign up for our Monthly Demos! See Demos & Events >>
Reading Time: 3 minutesToday, more than 70% of Web UI testing is being done through Selenium, a “free” open-source UI test automation framework. It is well understood that UI Testing is an important element in ensuring your software delivers a reliable customer experience.
How though can development teams, and organizations at large, maintain a high degree of confidence in those tests and overall quality of their application when unfortunately, there are so many pitfalls. In this article, learn how Parasoft helped the Stickyminds Web UI testing community understand the major Selenium challenges of stability, maintainability and long execution times and how to better identify and solve them.
Read a preview of the article below and see the full article as it appeared on Stickyminds.com here: “Enhancing Your Selenium Testing”.
Selenium offers free, open source software; is highly extensible and can run across multiple browsers, platforms, and operating systems; allows for running tests in parallel; and lets testers create tests without having to learn a scripting language, so it has been the choice for many teams.
Despite the Selenium suite’s wide-scale adoption in organizations of varying sizes and across many industries, it comes with some challenges. As with any open source tool, there’s no official user support, and the community element can complicate use. Its features are also not as rich as some other offerings, and it has problems with maintainability and scalability.
We talked to some experts in the test automation industry about Selenium’s reign as the tool of choice for UI testing, whether that crown is warranted, and what they think is important for teams to focus on when it comes to their test automation efforts.
Why is the industry standardizing on Selenium for web UI testing?
“Selenium is the most popular tool because it has such a large community,” said Adam Auerbach, vice president of quality engineering at EPAM Systems. “There are frameworks and information out there for free, and it’s very stable.”
He said there are other tools on the market that are starting to eat into Selenium’s presence, but Selenium is still one of the best examples of an open source tool and how it can be successful.
“Selenium is the gold standard,” Auerbach said.
Max Saperstone, director of test and automation at Coveros, agreed about its popularity.
“I wouldn’t necessarily say Selenium is a standard for web UI testing, but it absolutely has the greatest market share,” he said. “One of the reasons is Selenium has been around for 15 years. It’s been tested, and it’s trusted. It’s also free and open source, which makes it really valuable.”
Saperstone pointed out that one of the other big things that has really propelled Selenium’s success is the fact that there are many enterprise-level organizations using it for their UI testing and throwing their support behind it, including Google, IBM, and LinkedIn.
Despite adoption from large companies, Paul Grizzaffi, principal automation architect at Magenic, thinks the price is what drives the most interest.
“People like the reality or illusion of free,” he said. “The allure of free is a big powerful draw. Also, everyone else is using it, so we should, too. That’s not to say Selenium isn’t worthwhile; I like Selenium. I use it a lot.”
Still, Grizzaffi said, people often are willing to spend money on designer tools because they feel like the open source ones aren’t meeting their needs.
Read the rest of the article here on Stickyminds.com.
To get a free trial of Parasoft Selenic click below.
Parasoft’s industry-leading automated software testing tools support the entire software development process, from when the developer writes the first line of code all the way through unit and functional testing, to performance and security testing, leveraging simulated test environments along the way.