What's New in Selenium-Automated Testing

 What's New  in Selenium-Automated Visual Testing 

Selenium has been one of the most popular tools for automating cross-browser testing of web applications. Earlier this year, Simon Stewart (the creator of WebDriver and a pivotal contributor to Selenium projects) formally announced Selenium 4. Due to its redesigned features and functionalities, Selenium 4 has gained enormous traction since then. This is one of the critical improvements in Selenium 4 and a new, shiny UI design for a better user experience. In this article, we are going to see what is trending and new testing has come in selenium-automated visual testing.

 

Table of contents:

• What is Selenium-automated?

• Who has developed Selenium?

• What is Visual testing?

• How to perform Visual Testing using Selenium?

• What is new in Selenium-automated?

• Conclusion

What is Selenium-automated: 

 

This tool can be integrated with tools such as TestNG and JUnit for managing test cases and producing reports. It consists of a suite of free tools for automating the testing of internet applications. You do not have to feel disappointed since it only works for testing web applications since other programs offer the same functionality. Testing desktop and mobile applications can be performed with many tools, including IBM's RFI, HP's QPI, and Appium. However, the purpose of this Selenium tutorial is to make you understand why Selenium is the best choice for testing dynamic web applications.

 

A significant advantage of Selenium over other testing tools is that it is open-source, which eliminates the licensing fees. In addition to these factors, Selenium's popularity continues to grow for the following reasons:

• Programming languages commonly used for test scripts include Java, Python, C#, PHP, Ruby, Perl, and .Net.

• Tests can be conducted on any of the following operating systems: Windows, Mac, or Linux.

• Any of the following browsers can be used to perform tests: Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Safari, and Opera.

• You can integrate it with tools such as TestNG and JUnit to manage test cases and generate reports.

• It is integrated with Maven, Jenkins, and Docker to achieve continuous testing.

Let's examine Selenium automated testing in more detail, as it has revolutionised the development pipeline.

 

Who has developed Selenium?

 

The Selenium project was built by many developers since it is not a single tool but a collection of several tools. Jason Huggins, an engineer, employed by ThoughtWorks, was the first to realise that the web application he was developing often required testing. This was when Jason Huggins came up with Selenium. Manually testing applications repeatedly took too much time and effort, so he decided it was inefficient. In order to control actions in the browser automatically, he built a JavaScript program that he called JavaScriptTestRunner. Selenium later became known as this tool.

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What is Visual Testing?

 

Automated visual testing compares an app's output with a baseline image to determine whether it matches the desired output.

 

Visual testing is the process of comparing pixel differences in an image in its simplest form (sometimes known as snapshot testing).

 

In modern approaches, artificial intelligence is incorporated, known as Visual AI, which lets people see as a human eye would and avoid false positives.

 

The use of tools like Storybook in development allows for visual testing. In contrast, automated testing frameworks like Selenium, Cypress, and WebDriverIO can perform end-to-end functional testing on the functioning application.

 

How to perform Visual testing using Selenium?

Coming Soon...

How to perform Web Automation testing using Selenium?

 

Selenium allows you to write test code that runs through all the steps in your web app faster and with better results than manual testing. So here are the steps to perform selenium testing.

 

Step 1: Create a Remote Session: 

In this, you have to create an instance of Selenium's Remote WebDriver class. 

 

Step 2: Navigate to a Web Page:

To test a specific element, call the get method on your WebDriver instance with the variable name you assigned, and pass the URL of the web page you want to test as an argument.

 

Step 3: Locate an HTML Element on a Web Page:

When the test script accesses the page to test, it must locate the features which the end user would interact with. This is the Login form and the Submit button. Choosing Inspect from the context menu of the right-clicked element allows you to locate an element.

 

Step 4: Perform Actions on Located Elements:

Use an instance of the WebElement interface to simulate user interaction with the website elements you have located. This includes:

● Use the “Send keys” method to enter text.

● Input fields can be cleared by using "clear."

● Using the "click" method to simulate a mouse down action

● Using the "submit" method will submit a form

 

Step 5: Assert a Result:

Tests cannot exist without assertions. Each test should have something specific to validate and at least one explicit line of code to ensure that the functionality is fine as intended.

 

Step 6: Report the Results:

In this, always keeping track of the success and failure of your tests is essential for identifying problems. Test takers use various methods and amounts of information.

 

Step 7: End the Session:

The final step in testing the Selenium is to close the browser by calling the quit method on the Remote WebDriver instance.

 

What is new in Selenium-Automated Testing?

 

A lot of developments have come up since Selenium 4, which was announced at the time of the State of the Union Keynote by Simon Stewart and Manoj Kumar. There has been a consequential amount of work done, and we've confinement at least six alpha versions and four betas of Selenium 4 for users to try out and report back with any potential bugs so that Selenium four can make it right. Further, we have officially released it here. Now, it is an inspiring and exciting time for the Selenium community; as we have said, there are a lot of new features and enhancements that make Selenium WebDriver even more functional and flexible for practical use cases.

Selenium has set a room of tools designed to support different user groups:

• Selenium IDE encourages rapid test development, and it doesn't require extensive programming knowledge

• WebDriver has available  a friendly and flexible API for browser automation in many programming languages

• Using Grid, you can distribute and run your tests across multiple machines.

Thus, now jump into it and take a look at some of the significant features that were released in every element of those tools and give some of the cool forthcoming features that are now available in Selenium 4.

1. Selenium WebDriver:

 

WebDriver was released as a major version (Selenium 4) because all W3C protocols were adopted. Selenium WebDriver has implemented the W3C protocol dialect with the JSON wire protocol since version 3.8. This change will not affect users in any way since all major browser drivers (such as geckodriver and chrome driver), as well as many third-party projects, have already fully adopted the W3C protocol.

Therefore, there is a certain amount of notable new APIs, as well as the removal of deprecated APIs in the WebDriver API, such as:

• Elements:

• The elements such asFindsBy* interfaces (e.g. FindsByID, FindsByCss …) have been deleted . Alternatively, you can pass a *By* instance to `findElements` instead.

• "Relative locators": terms that users commonly use, such as "near", "left of", "right of", "above" and "below". Several tools, including Taiko by ThoughtWorks, have been based on this approach. Sahi by Narayan Raman originally inspired it.

• A complete set of exceptions that provide better explanations for failures. There are several exceptions in this category, such as ElementClickInterceptedError and NoSuchCookieError.

• Chrome Debugging Protocol (CDP):

• Even though Selenium 4 works on every browser, CDP integration can be used to gain increased visibility into the browser through a debugging protocol for those browsers which support it.

• It's not the most user-friendly API, as the CDP is designed for debuggers. Fortunately, Selenium is working on providing cross-language APIs for common requirements, such as mocking network connections, capturing logs, and capturing geolocations.

• Browser Specifics:

• Chrome and Edge now have a new ChromiumDriver package.

• Installing and uninstalling Firefox add-ons at runtime is now possible.

• Window Handling:

• Script execution can be done in full-screen mode.

• The ability to choose whether new windows should open as tabs or in their own window.

• Screenshots:

• UI element level screenshots are available. This differs from the usual viewport screenshots.

• Firefox browser now supports full-page screenshots.

Improvements in Selenium 4 are:

• User experience has been improved by a new shiny UI.

• This plugin is based on Web Extensions and therefore can run in Chrome and Firefox browsers, as well as in any other browser that supports Web Extensions. A version for MS Edge should be available soon.

• Java, .Net, Python, Ruby & JavaScript code exports are now available for all the official language bindings.

• With this new plugin system, users can make their own commands and new code exports for different languages and frameworks. It is possible to ship plugins as extensions. A plugin that enables code-less visual testing is Applitools for Selenium IDE.

• Selenium-side runner runs on Node.js and is a new CLI runner. Using this feature, users can run recorded tests simultaneously in multiple browsers.

• Using "while" and "if" conditions make it easier to write better tests.

• Based on recorded information, use a backup element selector that selects elements based on another locator strategy like ID, CSS & XPath. Stability and reliability are improved.

• You can now access Selenium IDE! The app conforms to some of the most up-to-date accessibility standards, and it supports necessary controls like focus order, roles, tooltips, recording, color, and design.

2. Selenium Grid

With Selenium 4, users no longer have to set up heavy virtual machines. Instead, containers can be spun up via Docker instead of machines. Selenium Grizzly Grid's design is now based on Kubernetes, which offers excellent scaling and self-healing capabilities.

A few improvements that have been made so far are:

• A scalable and traceable Selenium Grid deployment is now possible.

• The Grid can either be deployed stand-alone, as a hub-node or in a distributed mode with multiple processes
  
  

• Observability is the ability to measure what is happening inside a system, a feature that allows investigating the results of API calls or requests for new sessions. Administrators and developers can use this information when debugging problems, providing insight into the underlying cause when peculiar behavior is observed.

• Default communication with Selenium Grid takes place over HTTP. When you expose your server to the internet, this is problematic. It is fine for most uses within a firewall. Using HTTPS with TLS connections allows Grids to communicate via the HTTPS protocol now.

• The old version only supported IPV4 addresses, but now it also supports IPV6 addresses.

• Configuration files have always been supported by Grid when spinning up instances. To make them easier for humans to understand, Grid 4's files can use TOML.

Conclusion: 

 

So That's all about Selenium-Automated Visual Testing. Selenium-Automated Visual Testing has been enhanced with many new features and things. Share which features of Selenium-Automated Visual Testing you like the most in the comments below. Would love to know how you find Selenium-Automated Visual Testing & what you'd like to see in the next update

Guest Author

Amruddin Shaik is a Digital Marketer and Content Contributor, Who is working with MindMajix, a top global online training provider. I’m a tech enthusiast and have a great understanding of today’s technology. Having an In-depth knowledge of IT and demanding technologies such as Software Automation Testing, Big Data, Cloud Computing,  Cyber Security  etc.