Selenium was originally developed by Jason Huggins, who was later joined by other programmers and testers at Thoughtworks. Selenium is a robust set of tools that supports rapid development of test automation for web-based applications. Selenium provides a rich set of testing functions specifically geared to the needs of testing of a web application. Selenium is an Open Source automation tool for web application testing.This tool is primarily developed in Java Script and browser technologies and hence support all the major browsers on all the platforms.Selenium’s key features is the support for executing one’s tests on multiple browser platforms.
There are three variants of Selenium which can be used in isolation or in combination to create complete automation suite for web applications.
1. Selenium IDE
2. Selenium Core
3. Selenium Remote Control (SRC)
Selenium IDE
Selenium IDE is an Integrated Development Environment for Selenium tests. It is implemented as FireFox extension, and allow you to record,edit and debug tests. Selenium IDE includes the entire Selenium Core, allow you to easily and quickly record and play back test.It provides the simplest introduction to Selenium and is highly recommended for beginners. You can save the tests / test suite created in xml or html format. However to run them in an automated fashion you need Selenium Remote Control which is described next. We able to record the test in the following formats HTML,Java,Groovy,C#,Perl,PHP,Python and Ruby. The format which is chosen by the user is get recorded inside the "source" tab of the Selenium IDE. You may also run your scripts from the Selenium-IDE. It’s simple to use and is recommended for less-technical users. The IDE allows developing and running tests without the need for programming skills. We can execute single test case or group of test cases (test suite). Selenium IDE has inbuilt Test Runner to execute the recorded test cases.It shows the number of test cases on the left frame and the corressponding code on the center frame and test execution result is displayed on the right frame. The bottom frame shows the recorded test action.
Snapshots
Selenium IDE - FireFox Plugin
Test Runner Window
Test Runner Window