What are the major advantages and disadvantages of Selenium Tool?

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Permalink Reply by Masanigudem Jayachandra Reddy on December 1, 2010 at 2:06pm

Selenium is at present the most powerful Open Source Automation tool available. It is based on java scripting to a large extent.

It is more suited for the agile methodology of coding and testing.
Open Source Tool is Main Advantage

Mainly disadvantage is no proper support for the tool
add-ons are not provided like in qtp to recognize object.

Let me know if any more advantages present for this tool...



We can work with multiple browser using Selenium RC, and we can run application in browsers in parallel way.
Jay

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Permalink Reply by Jason Huggins on December 1, 2010 at 5:43pm

"It is based on java scripting to a large extent."
Actually, Selenium supports writing tests in all the major languages: Java, C#, Ruby, Python, Perl, PHP. Selenium is primarily implemented in Java and JavaScript.

"Mainly disadvantage is no proper support for the tool"

Incorrect. If by proper support, you mean commercial support, several companies, including my own (Sauce Labs) provides support for Selenium.
http://saucelabs.com/support
http://seleniumhq.org/support

[Disclosure: I started the Selenium project. :-)]

- Jason

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Permalink Reply by vivek on December 1, 2010 at 7:31pm

Can Selenium work apart from web application ?

Which Technologies Selenium support ? (Ex. ERP, Network Terminal Emulator, Delphi, PHP, Silver Light )

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Permalink Reply by Jason Huggins on December 1, 2010 at 9:45pm

Selenium was designed for testing browser-based web applications. If it runs in a browser, Selenium can test it. That's okay, because the web keeps growing and growing and growing. Most ERP's have a web front end - testable by Selenium. There are browser based terminal emulators (http://code.google.com/p/shellinabox/). There are extensions to Selenium to support special cases like Flash/Flex (use FlexPilot), and Silverlight (http://code.google.com/p/silverlight-selenium/). If you have to test something that is non-web, you'll have to use something else, though.

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Permalink Reply by Sri Vidhya on December 2, 2010 at 6:24pm

Thank you very much Jason:)

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Permalink Reply by Raj Subramanian on July 18, 2019 at 2:16am

Selenium has been around for a while and is one of the most popular open source testing tools out there. I myself have used Selenium for 8 years and it does have some great features. The reason people are still using Selenium is-

1. It is FREE. You do not pay for any of the services
2. It is “Technical Friendly”. Anyone who is used to writing code to build things will love Selenium; as what code you write is what gets implemented in automation. So developers and technical testers are more inclined towards using this compared to record/playback tools
3. It is Extensible. You are free to add your own wrapper around Selenium to do whatever functionalities you want. This is lacking in most of the codeless testing automation tools
4. It supports multiple scripting/programming languages like C#, Java, JavaScript, Ruby etc. Not many tools do that

That being said I think it does have its own limitations such as

• Spending majority of your valuable testing time fixing flaky tests
• Unable to make automation progress due to the lack of skilled programmers to write automated tests
• Not finding enough support in the open source community when new libraries and updates break existing tests and you have no idea what to do
• Need of visual validation when a step fails, to visually understand the exact reason for the failure
• Insufficient logging information when your tests fail
• Finding it hard to seamlessly integrate your automated tests within your CI/CD pipeline
• Inability to handle dynamically changing elements on the web page
• No inbuilt functionalities to automate actions that involve multiple tabs, hovers, scroll and other complex user actions
• The need to give explicit and implicit waits manually to make tests more stable
• Flakiness with the inbuilt options of the IDE such as Record/Playback where it seizes to work in some situations for no reason

I think a lot of people have understood the above problems and are trying to fix these issues.

Check out these 2 articles that describe Selenium/Selenium IDE with other tools that are out there-

Top 3 Selenium IDE alternatives to build test automation frameworks

Top 3 selenium alternatives to involve non-technical people in auto...

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Permalink Reply by Anand Singh on November 22, 2019 at 3:48pm

As per observations of software testing services company, below are the major advantages and disadvantages of Selenium tool:

Advantages of Selenium
1) The major advantage of Selenium is, it is an Open Source Software
2) Various programming languages are supported by Selenium to write programs (Test scripts) like Java,C#,Perl,Python,Ruby and PHP
3) Various operating systems are supported by Selenium(MS Windows, Linux, Macintosh etc…)
4) Various Browsers are supported by Selenium (Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, IE, Opera, Safari etc…)
5) Parallel Test Execution can be performed by Selenium .
6) Hardware resources requirement is very less by using Selenium

Disadvantages of Selenium
1) Selenium supports only Web-based applications not desktop-based applications.
2) Time-Consuming in creating test scripts
3) Limited support for Image Testing.
4) New features may not work properly.

Thanks

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