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So far as the software industry is concerned, after any product arrives at the manual testing stage, almost all the organizations consider automated testing to cut down on the cost that manual testing involves. For any project, companies are rapidly inclining towards open source automated testing tools rather than investing in commercial testing tools which come at a high price. With no investment for licensing, open source testing instruments come with significant features that enable the convenient automation of testing of web portals and software applications. Selenium is by far one of the most popular automated testing tools for websites. With the passage of time, Selenium is becoming more and more popular and it is the most preferred choice of organizations and automation testers for automated testing of web applications, applicable for the functionality as well as the GUI.
There are a number of reasons why organizations prefer to use Selenium for automated testing. Here we will discuss the top 10 reasons. But before that, let us have an overview of the available test packages and modes of Selenium.

Test Packages of Selenium
Selenium comprises a package of diverse test components mainly consisting of four main tools. Each of the tools has a definite role to play in supporting the development of automated testing pertaining to a web application.

• Selenium IDE: This is in fact an add-on feature for Mozilla Firefox. This is generally used for playback, record, debugging and edit of selenium scripts.
• Selenium RC: This is alternatively known as Selenium Remote Control and is utilized to run tests across various systems and browsers.
• Selenium Grid: It is capable of running diverse cases of Selenium RC at the same time. Selenium Grid facilitates distribution of tests across different browsers and machines so that parallel execution of the tests can be carried out.
• Selenium Webdriver: This is the latest version of Selenium which comprises a number of Selenium APIs.

Modes of Selenium
For execution of test suites and test cases, Selenium comes with the following three modes.

• Record-Playback mode: Within this mode, Selenium IDE can only be used for recording test scenarios with regards to test cases pertaining to Firefox. This offers a brilliant way to start off with writing tests as well as grouping the same together in order to build the test suite. It is possible to export the tests that are recorded to several programming languages; hence they can be tweaked and put within the testing framework. These test suites and test cases can then be replayed in order to check the validations and verifications or transported to Selenium Grid or RG for more tweaking.
• Selenium Remote Control Mode: Here, Selenium starts off manifold browsers one after the other, following which it runs the test cases that have been recorded and saved in the preferred language. This promotes the enhancement of the test cases with the help of programming and looping techniques with the aim to cover all the necessary checks and test scenarios.
• Test Runner Mode: This mode involves the recording and replaying of test cases as HTML tables. It constitutes just another method for execution of Selenium RC and Selenium IDE test cases. Here, the test result reports are checked in cases they have not been already formatted.

10 Reasons Why Selenium is Great to Use

• Taking the other automation tools into consideration, Selenium has the capability to operate on almost every OS.
• Selenium is an open source testing tool and hence it serves for cost-effective automation testing.
• Selenium supports multiple languages such as Python, Pearl, Ruby, PHP, .NET (C#) and Java. You are required to be comfortable in just a single language in order to operate Selenium.
• One highly beneficial feature of Selenium is that the language used for building the program is independent of the language that the web application or website is using. This implies that the test script can be developed in any of the languages that Selenium supports.
• This testing tool supports a range of browsers like Opera, Safari, Chrome, IE 6, 7, 8 and Mozilla Firefox.
• Selenium has a very dynamic developer community that is backed by Google.
• So far as Selenium is concerned, we have a number of robust methods for location of elements such as CSS, Xpath, DOM, and so on.
• With Selenium, it is convenient to implement frameworks that revolve around Object oriented programming like Keyword Driven, Data driven and Hybrid.
• Selenium provides support for integration of open source frameworks like TestNG, JUnit, NUnit and so on.
• With the use of Selenium, it is possible to execute simultaneous tests leveraging various browsers on various machines. This is turn cuts down the time for test execution when a large project is in progress.

With its useful features, Selenium automation testing serves as a key tool for browser compatibility testing as well as system functional testing. It is indeed strong when compared to the available tools for automation testing and is very simple and flexible.

We provide selenium web application testing services. If you would like to discuss with an expert selenium tester from our team, please get in touch with us at Mindfire Solutions.