Technology
To Automate Or Not To Automate? Selenium Grid Makes It Easy
Selenium is an open-source test automation framework used to automate web application testing using its automation framework, which includes the Selenium Grid, one of its four components.
Selenium was developed by Jason Huggins in 2004 as a web-based automated testing interface that quickly gained a lot of popularity.
Automated browser testing with Selenium Grid: What Makes It Ideal?
Testing automation is often a time-consuming process when it comes to designing and implementing test cases, especially when there are a large number of operating systems, browser versions, and devices that have to be tested on.
Patrick Lightbody came up with a feature called Hosted QA which allowed him to run test cases simultaneously on multiple platforms and devices, later renamed Selenium Grid.
Selenium grid enabled QA and development teams to run different test scripts on different browsers and platforms, resulting in a significant reduction in test time.
The Selenium Grid can easily automate Selenium tests, regardless of the browser, operating system, or version you are using. Selenium Grid supports Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge, Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and others.
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An overview of the Selenium Grid Architecture
Basically, Selenium Grid uses a client/server architecture, where the client corresponds to a ‘Hub’ and the server corresponds to a ‘Node’. Together, they form the grid ‘Selenium Grid’.
Selenium Grid Hub: In this central system, clients submit test case requests and the requests are distributed automatically to different nodes based on their capabilities. In a grid, you are only allowed to use one node.
Selenium Grid Node: The node machine is connected to the hub and executes scripts from the hub, which allows launching of multiple nodes on different devices running different environments.
Install and setup a Grid: A Selenium server needs to be installed in order to use Selenium Grid. Creating a Selenium Grid hub requires opening a command prompt or terminal and navigating to where the Selenium Standalone Server jar file is located.
Following the creation of the Hub, launching a node would be the next step to setting up Selenium Grid for parallel execution.
Having covered all the basics of Selenium Grid, we will focus on a few key reasons why Selenium Grid is considered ideal for automated browser testing.
Benefits of Selenium Grid
- Selenium Grid allows you to distribute your test cases for execution.
- Batch processing is sped up
- Performs multi-browser testing
- Tests on multiple operating systems
Multi-Browser Support
In grid testing, multiple runtime environments, specifically different browsers, are tested at the same time. For instance, the application to be tested can be tested on a ‘grid’ of virtual machines, each running a different browser.
The first machine has Internet Explorer 8, the second has Internet Explorer 9, machine three has Chrome, and machine four has Firefox. During the execution of the test suite, Selenium-Grid receives each test and browser combination and runs each test against the browser specified for the test. One can also create a grid with all the same browser, type, and version.
One could create a server-farm (in a sense) of Firefox instances by having a grid of four machines each running three instances of Firefox 70. Upon running the suite, each test is passed to Grid that assigns it to the next Firefox instance that is available.
The result is that 12 tests can run concurrently at the same time in parallel, thereby reducing the time required to complete a test pass.
Parallel Test Execution (Local and Cloud-Based)
Parallel testing reduces the amount of time and effort required for testing and results in a faster release time. It is especially useful for cross-browser testing, compatibility testing, localization testing, and internalization testing.
We can compare two versions of software simultaneously and find issues faster in a situation where we have two versions of software available and need to check their stability and compatibility.
Selenium framework allows testing on local machines and local Selenium Grid, which lets you test browser compatibility with a few combinations of browsers and operating systems.
Android & iOS Mobile App Testing
You should always test your web-based apps and websites on mobile devices, as well as on desktop devices to make sure there are no usability issues.
With Selenium Grid and the associated frameworks such as PyTest, NUnit, etc., testing can be done predominantly on desktop devices, using different combinations of browsers and operating systems.
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Dedicated Framework Support
Selenium supports a variety of programming languages that offer built-in frameworks for testing browser compatibility.
The integration of Selenium with Jenkins, Maven and Docker to support continuous testing makes it even more attractive.
Integrating tools like TestNG and JUnit with Selenium makes it simple to manage test cases and generate reports, thus making the whole testing process more agile.
Maintenance is easier with reusable code
The developers should take conscious steps to avoid code duplication regardless of the test framework being used, thus ensuring improved portability and maintenance.
Utilizing features like regrouping, code refactoring, Page Object Model (POM), etc., Selenium Grid prevents code duplication and creates reusable tests.
This relieves the burden of maintaining a messy & unmaintainable piece of source code, and frees up resources.
Simulation
You can emulate keyboard and mouse actions, like right-clicking, filling in usernames in text boxes, etc. using the Selenium Grid framework.
No matter what programming language you use, whether C#, JavaScript, Python, or any other supported by Selenium, each offers classes and packages to automate user interaction based scenarios.
Optimum Hardware Usage
Whenever a software operation is executed, the developer optimizes the code to make it as CPU-efficient as possible.
In order to ensure that the speed of an application’s execution is not adversely impacted by browser cross-platform testing, code optimization is vital, regardless of whether it is performed on local infrastructure or cloud infrastructure.
In comparison with other testing tools such as UFT, QTP and others, Selenium test automation scores high points when it comes to CPU utilization.
Automation of Browser Interactions
Browser compatibility tests involve both keyboard and mouse interaction in addition to the browser buttons.
There are many ways in which Selenium automation testing can deal with flaky test scenarios, such as Implicit/Explicit Wait, Wait for JavaScript to Load, etc.
Selenium enables automation of complicated browser interactions like clicking the Back button, Refresh button, etc. which can come handy in websites that do not store cookies or store data in the cache.
Selenium allows web developers to automate complicated browser interactions like clicking back and forward, refreshing, etc. that are frequently used in websites that do not store cookies or cache data.
No External Server Requirement
You do not require any investment of additional servers to automate Selenium test cases if you plan to use local machines for testing. The Selenium WebDriver will allow you to execute browser compatibility tests.
Using a remote machine acting as a Selenium server or moving manual browser testing to the Selenium Grid cloud can be the most effective means of performing comprehensive automated browser testing.
Selenium test automation through the cloud
What is your team’s process for testing browser compatibility across a wide range of devices, browsers, and operating systems?
Anyhow, with so many combinations of browsers, manual testing won’t be possible.
You can conduct parallel testing via remote Selenium Grid, which is essentially a Selenium Grid on the cloud, using cloud-based Selenium frameworks.
Last but not the least: Extensive Language Support
CI/CD tools such as Jenkins, Docker, etc. can be integrated with the Selenium framework, thereby leveraging the benefits of continuous testing.
As a result, developers can take advantage of Selenium test automation for verifying cross-browser scenarios.
With experience in a particular programming language, you also become more at ease with the language, and this is equally true for test frameworks.
More experienced programmers can quickly adjust to a new language, but might have to spend more time troubleshooting after development.
The advantage of a Selenium test framework over competing frameworks is that it is platform-agnostic, so you can write a Linux source code and it will run on Windows, Mac, etc.
With Selenium, you can test applications written in JavaScript, C#, Python, Ruby on Rails, Perl, etc.
In closing, a few important words
Those with experience in test automation prefer Selenium Grid automation since they only have to learn the nuances and implement it for their project.
LambdaTest is a cloud-based cross-browser testing platform that allows you to test your website/web application across 3000+ browsers, browser versions, and operating systems.
LambdaTest provides an online Selenium Grid to assist you in parallelizing browser testing. You may also combine your LambdaTest account with a variety of CI/CD solutions, project management tools, codeless automation tools, and so on for a faster time to market.You can also perform live interactive real-time cross-browser testing as well as responsive testing on your web app/website.
In addition to helping other Selenium Grid users on technical forums, the Selenium framework is updated frequently, so there is always excitement about new releases!
Since Selenium test automation is widely used by consumer tech startups and large enterprises alike, there is a vibrant support ecosystem.
In addition to checking StackOverFlow, which has an extensive collection of questions under the Selenium and Selenium WebDriver tags, you can also check out the Selenium Slack Channel and the Selenium user group.