Modern-day software development cycles necessitate speed and efficiency at every step of the way to ensure that the time-to-market and the quality of the software being released, both keep pace with not only the demands of the users but, the industry standards as well. Developers, testers, and Quality Assurance teams across organizations are well aware of the benefits of testing automation. The software testing process becomes less cumbersome and, error-free with the use of automation testing.
One of the most prevalent tools for test automation that is widely used across the globe is Selenium. Selenium automation testing is done to ensure that your web applications function correctly on various browsers across devices and operating systems.
The popularity of Selenium is almost completely uncontested when it comes to automation testing. Let us understand what Selenium is all about in the points below:
- Selenium is a free and open-source testing tool that “developers” can use for creating and automating tests for web applications across a large number of different browsers and platforms.
- Since it is an open-source suite of tools, there is no investment to be made in terms of licensing fees when using Selenium.
- A significant edge that Selenium has over other testing automation tools is that the testing framework supports a variety of programming languages. The developers can write/build test scripts using multiple languages like:
- Java
- Python
- C#
- Ruby
- PHP
- JavaScript
and many more. - Being an open-source tool, Selenium has a very strong community of users that are constantly launching updates and upgrades for the Selenium suite. Help is also easily accessible when it comes to grasping the functioning of these upgrades.
- The Selenium platform is made up of four main components:
- Selenium WebDriver,
- Selenium IDE (Integrated Development Environment),
- Selenium Grid, and
- Selenium RC (Now obsolete)
Together these form a strong testing automation framework for web applications. Each of the above is utilized for a variety of testing purposes.
These features make Selenium among the top choice for undertaking web app automation testing for organizations. Even with its evident advantages, there are certain challenges that QA testers face while employing Selenium testing for web automation.
The Most Common Selenium Automation Testing Challenges
I. Requires programming skills
Selenium, essentially, is a set of APIs or an SDK that can help you write programs to automatically test your program. This requires investment in resources that are skilled in any of the supported programming languages.
In traditional enterprises where manual QA is still the norm, this job normally falls to the developers or a new role of Automation Engineers is carved out. The new age Automation Engineers or SDETs are developers with a focus on test automation – and hence they charge as much as the developers.
This can add to the overall costs for the enterprises.
II . No scope for mobile testing
Selenium is used for automation testing of websites and web applications across different browsers and desktop operating systems. When it comes to apps for mobile devices which are based on operating systems that are different from those for a desktop, namely- iOS, Android, and the like, Selenium’s testing automation capability poses a limitation.
With an ever-increasing number of end-users consuming content on mobile phones, this proves to be one of the major drawbacks of the Selenium framework.
The way around this is to use third-party apps like Appium, which is an open-source testing framework that uses WebDriver protocol, helping to test iOS and Android apps.
III. Difficulty in handling the issue of native pop-ups
When it comes to the writing tests for the automation of pop-ups, Selenium loses a bit of its appeal among testers. The Selenium framework for testing is limited to the browser, hence pop-ups that are browser-based can be managed with the use of Selenium. When we take the case of pop-ups surfacing from the operating system, these are beyond the scope of Selenium’s framework.
The need may then arise to utilize additional extensions to automate OS-based pop-ups and, ensure compatibility and consistency between these third-party extensions and Selenium.
IV. Problem of test flakiness
Tests are said to be flaky when they don’t give consistent results each time that they are run. They pass sometimes and fail the rest of the time. Flakiness in the test happens due to many reasons.
For example, a UI element being validated is dynamic and takes some time to appear on the screen. It sometimes appears on time and sometimes it takes longer and by that time the test reverts it as a failure. Unless such scenarios are addressed properly in the tests, testers may ignore these results which will negatively affect the accuracy of the app being tested.
V. Issue of CAPTCHA automation
The rising threats to digital security and privacy have made CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) an essential element of any web-based application. CAPTCHA is a feature used to distinguish human users from bots, in order to safeguard against cyber-attacks, by asking the user to perform a certain task involving images, audio, and/or texts.
Since CAPTCHA is by its nature and purpose meant to prevent non-human intervention on the web application, automating this critical UI component becomes a tricky affair when using Selenium for automation testing of web pages and applications.
VI. Managing dynamic elements is complex
A website or a web application contains both static as well as dynamic elements in its structure. The components which are static in nature can be easily incorporated into Selenium automation testing without any problems. It is the dynamic component that can prove to be a challenge. Websites and web applications today are becoming increasingly dynamic in nature.
The content on a website differs according to user-specific information, for example, based on the location of the user or a particular option the user selects from a menu, or sometimes, the webpage shows up new information after some time has passed.
In such cases, the dynamic elements that are so integral to the functioning of the web page or application may not be efficiently managed by the Selenium framework.
Selenium uses a set of locators to identify UI elements on the page. In the case of dynamic elements, getting to the most efficient locator strategy is the most challenging and half the battle.
VII. Test maintenance becomes a tedious task
A vital part of test automation is maintenance. As QA teams use Selenium for their automation needs, one of the biggest challenges they face is test script maintenance. The slightest change in the User Interface can break the tests. The tester has to identify manually the modification and write fixes for it accordingly. Selenium Tests are code after all and come with the same set of challenges that any application code has.
VIII. Limitations to cross-browser testing
An end-user can use a web application on any of the several browsers available out there, like Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, etc., and the expectation is that the user experience is consistent no matter what browser is used. There are a large number of browsers that exist in the market today, along with their different versions.
To ensure a robust user experience, one has to ensure automated tests support the majority of browser-OS combinations that the customer uses. Selenium supports most contemporary browsers and OS, however, switching from one combination to the other requires coding effort.
IX. Limited reporting
Selenium has consistently proven to be a great tool for writing and executing tests for automation. One of the major areas where it is lacking is test reporting: an essential step in the process of testing.
The best testing scripts created in Selenium will be incomplete without proper reporting and feedback since there will be no means to track test information and results. The information becomes difficult to communicate and share with the team members as well.
Since the Selenium framework does not have a comprehensive in-built reporting system, organizations have to use third-party tools for their test reporting needs.
X. Obstacles to multi-tab testing
The ideal situation in the case of switching from one browser window to another is that when a link is clicked on by a user, the new window becomes a child window and once this window is closed, the original parent window should gain back control.
Even though the Selenium framework provides the possibility of testing in multiple tabs, this can often prove to be a challenge in case the exact command for it is not known beforehand.
XI. Issue of Scalability
Selenium automation testing presents the challenge of scalability. There is some limitation to the number and speed of tests that can be done with Selenium in one go.
Selenium WebDriver allows for sequential testing only, but Selenium Grid does allow for testing parallelly. There is a caveat here, though. The web app cannot run parallel tests for combinations of OS and browsers. Simultaneous tests can only be done for a single OS-browser selection. Hence, scalability is not something that Selenium provides when it comes to automation testing. For a simpler web app, it may still work, but as apps become increasingly complex, this issue can become a hindrance.
Conclusion
Selenium is one of the most popular and widely used tools for automation testing of web-based applications today. As noted above, even with some of its remarkable features like being a free and open-source framework, it can put some limitations and throw challenges at the developers and testers who use Selenium for automation testing purposes. Are you wondering whether there even is a solution for all these issues with Selenium automation testing? Yes, there is!
Bqurious with its cloud-based, low/no-code testing automation platform can tackle all these challenges. Check this out to know how Bqurious surpasses the Selenium framework in the area of automation testing: https://bqurious.com/bqurious-vs-selenium/