Which Testing Can Be Automated With Selenium?
Selenium testing tool can help you with browser automation for various purposes.
Unit Testing
Unit testing is done by the developers when a feature enhancement or a bug-fix is applied to a module of a web-application. Unit testing can be strenuous if a developer has to work over multiple code changes for different modules.
We've multiple unit testing frameworks specific to each programming language such as JUnit for Java, NUnit for Python, and more, to help us automate unit testing. Selenium is compatible with these unit testing frameworks and can help developers quickly validate their unit testing over various browsers + OS combinations.
System Testing or Black Box Testing
In system testing, testers check the compliance of the system with specific requirements. It involves testing functionality of a module from an end-to-end perspective. Testers neither have any tests executed previously nor do they have any context of the code. A QA professional could draft a script to verify the functionality of the entire system.
Selenium automation can help you with black box testing scripts, saving you the bandwidth to come up with more unique test scenarios.
Integration Testing
In Integration testing, the QA team performs tests to make sure that components or units working fine independently work well even when put together. Testers verify that the modules give the same output even after they integrate. This takes place when more than one module is combined together to exhibit a functionality
Selenium automation can help you perform a thorough round of integration testing in every release cycle. That way, you can easily evaluate how multiple individual modules of your web-app would behave when put together.
End-to-End Testing
As a QA engineer, you are responsible for end-to-end testing of your web application from the end-user's perspective. You would have to think of a series of test cases to ensure the smooth functioning of different touchpoints on the web application.
End-to-End testing could take a considerable amount of your time as your web-application or website may have multiple features and web pages to test over a variety of devices, operating systems, and browsers. You may even have to keep tabs over performance of your web pages. Selenium automation can help you do it with much ease. With Selenium, you can run parallel testing for browser automation and prepare reports for evaluating performance parameters, statuses of test cases and more.
Regression Testing
Regression testing is performed to evaluate the end-to-end functionality of a web-application or website after any code change is pushed into one staging environment from another. The idea is to ensure that the latest addition of code isn't hampering the existing functionality of your web app. This is the main reason why regression testing is an integral part of every release cycle. It ensures that the existing system can flawlessly incorporate new features. However, it is also the most tedious process. As even for a minute change, you would've to test the entire web application again.
With Selenium testing tool, you can automate regression testing rounds and save your team a considerable amount of time and bandwidth in a narrow release window.
Automated Browser Testing
As we already discussed, cross browser testing is the primary reason behind the popularity of Selenium. Selenium supports all major browsers and allows you to perform browser automation to test your website over a variety of them, simultaneously through a Selenium Grid.
Performance & Load Testing
As far as the end-user is concerned, it all comes down to the performance of the web-app. Stakeholders set performance benchmarks and QA professionals run tests to determine whether the application performs as per expectations. For instance, testers check the loading time of the homepage of a website on all browsers.
Instead of manually running your web application over hundred of browsers + OS combinations, you can measure page load time with Selenium. Similarly, you can evaluate other performance metrics for your web-application through Selenium automation testing.
Monkey Testing
In Monkey testing, we try to break the system by giving a random input to the system. The input could be anything from an end-user’s perspective, it could be a click, scroll, or a dummy text string.
You can generate test scripts to automate monkey testing with Selenium. For example, you can have a program that constantly generates random click over a webpage by looking for web locators.
