What is Selenium and why is it chosen extensively?

Answer: Selenium is an automation testing framework or suite developed by Jason Huggins in the year 2004. It has been upgraded several times in the past. Selenium WebDriver 2.0 came in the market in the year 2011, 3.0 in the year 2016 and currently the latest version is 4.0.

Selenium is used to create automation scripts for verifying functional requirements in web applications thus reducing the manual testing efforts and increasing quality and productivity. It also supports a vast range of browsers and platforms.

Selenium is not a standalone tool; it is rather considered as a package of multiple tools so it is often referred to as a suite. Selenium comprises of the following group of tools −

• Selenium Integrated Development − Selenium Integrated Development also called Selenium IDE is a tool which primarily supports record and playback.

• Selenium Remote Control − Selenium Remote Control also called Selenium RC is basically a server that allows to create test scripts in multiple programming languages and browsers.

• Selenium WebDriver − It is a tool that has numerous advantages over Selenium RC. Selenium WebDriver does not have a server and it communicates with the browser.

• Selenium Grid − Selenium Grid allows execution to be carried out on more than one environment and browsers simultaneously. Thus it is often used for parallel execution.

Selenium is used extensively in the industry because of the following features −

Selenium can be used for the following testing types −

• Functional test cases

• Regression test cases

• Acceptance test cases

• Sanity test cases

• Smoke test cases

• End to End test cases

• Cross-browser test cases

• Integration test cases

• Integration test cases