What is Selenium?

Selenium is a suite of tools that allow you to test your web application for errors and ensure that it meets your users’ needs. It works by automating tasks on your website – like clicking links or filling in fields on forms. You can then use these actions as automated tests to verify that the entire application is functioning properly.

Why Selenium?

Selenium is a powerful tool for testing your web application because it’s extremely flexible and very user-friendly. Since Selenium automates tasks on your website, you don’t have to manually click every link or fill out every form field when running tests. Instead, you can create “test scripts” in programming languages like Java, C# or Ruby that automate the process for you. This allows you to efficiently test your website’s functionality by having Selenium run tasks when certain events happen – like when a visitor clicks on a link.

Steps To Test Web Applications with Selenium

Step 1: Describe the browsers and devices you want to test for.

Selenium needs to know exactly what browser and device it should emulate when running tests. For example, if your application is designed for mobile devices, set Selenium to run on either Chrome or Safari on iOS – this will ensure that the application performs as intended on different devices.

Step 2: Configure your browser.

You’ll need to configure Selenium to work with the browsers you outlined in Step 1 above. To do this, download and install either Google Chrome or Apple Safari for Windows (under the “Prerequisites” tab) – these are both free browser extensions that allow Selenium to run your tests.

Step 3: Set up your test environment.

After configuring Selenium to run on Safari or Chrome, download and install the free IDE – WebDriver (under the “Prerequisites” tab). This will allow you to write tests using various programming languages and easily execute them through Selenium.

Step 4: Code your test scripts.

Most Selenium tests involve automating tasks on your web application. For example, if you want to test what happens when a user clicks on a “login” link, create a script that does the following:

– Click(“Login”).

This will tell Selenium to click on this specific element (in our case, it’s the login link) on your website. You can find more information (including code samples) for programming languages like Java, C# and Ruby by checking out the Selenium documentation.

Step 5: Run your tests.

Now that you’ve written a test script open the WebDriver interface and press the “play” button to run your test. You can also save this test as a .JUnit file to run as often as you want – JUnit is a popular Selenium testing framework..

Step 6: Repeat steps 3-5.

After running your first test, you’ll probably want to perform these same steps for other features on your website. To do this, repeat steps 3-5 for each feature you want to test, and Selenium will automatically run the test when it detects that a user has interacted with that element. You can even automate your tests so that they run at specific times – for example. You might schedule nightly tests to ensure your application runs smoothly after you make changes.

Step 7: Run tests across different devices.

Web applications are not only designed to run on standard desktop browsers anymore – they’re meant to be used on a variety of devices, including tablets and smartphones. Selenium allows you to test your application’s compatibility with these devices by automating tasks across multiple browsers/operating systems – all without having to interact with each one manually.

Is Selenium Right For Me?

Selenium is a powerful tool that allows you to test your web application’s functionality, but it isn’t right for everyone. If you already have a set of tests and test scripts that work, then there’s no reason to change. However, if you’re starting from scratch or don’t already have defined tests, Selenium is a strong choice since it allows your team to easily automate tasks on your website and run them as part of automated tests.

Final Thoughts

We’ve talked about the basics of Selenium, how to set it up for use with your web application, and some best practices. Now that you have a basic understanding of what Selenium is and why it can be beneficial to test your website or web app for bugs before releasing them into production, let’s talk about where you should go from here. If you want help setting up continuous integration with HikeQA using our CI toolkit PIPE (Pipeline as Code), feel free to reach out to us out, and we’ll be happy to help.

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Web Testing is all about checking your web app or website for prospective bugs before going live and can be easily accessed by the common public. Testing looks out for functionality, usability, security, compatibility, and the performance of the web app or website.

At this level, problems like web app safety, the working of the site, its açcessibility to the disabled and normal users, and its capacity to manage traffic are looked into.

What Are The Best Methods For Web Application Testing In Software Engineering?

1. Website Functionality Testing:

Website Functionality Testing is a procedure that has different parameters like UI, APIs, security testing, database testing, client and server testing, and the most basic web functionalities. Functional Testing is easy and helps

users perform manual Testing and Automated Testing. It looks into the functionalities of every feature on the website.

The Web-based Testing Activities comprise of:

• Outgoing Links
• Internal Links
• Anchor Links
• MailTo Links

For the Testing Forms to work as expected, you need to ensure that these factors work properly:

• Scripting checks on the form are working normally. If a user is not filling up a mandatory section in a form, an error message pops up.
• You need to ensure that the default values get populated.
• As soon as they get submitted, the data inside the forms get sent onto a live database or connected to a functional email address.
• Forms are best formatted for improved readability.

The best ways used by premier quality assurance software testing companies to check whether Test Cookies are functioning the way they should are:

• Cookies are mini files put to use by websites to mainly remember the active user sessions so that you don’t require logging in each time you are there on a website.

• Testing the cookies (sessions) are removed either at the time when the cache is removed or at the time when they reach their expiry.
• Remove the cookies and ensure that the login credentials are asked for when you visit the site next time.

You need to Test HTML and CSS to make sure that the search engines are easily able to crawl your site. This must include:

1. Checking out the Syntax Errors.
2. Color schemas that can be properly read.
3. Ensure that standards like W3C, OASIS, ISO, IETF, ECMA, or WS-I are properly followed.

Testing The Business Workflows: This includes

• Testing your whole workflow and the business scenarios that take the user through the different web pages to be completed. 
• The negative situations are also to be tested so that whenever a user implements some unexpected step, a proper error message or help message is visible in your web app.

2. Usability Testing:

Usability Testing has turned into an integral part of any web project. It can be performed by any tester or a mini focus group like the customer base of the web app.

Testing the website Navigation:

• Menus, buttons, or links to various pages on your website must be visible and present on every webpage.

Testing the Content:

• Content must be appropriate with no spelling or grammar mistakes.
• If the images are present, they must consist of an “alt” text.

3. Interface Testing:

The 3 main areas that need to be tested in the case of Interface Testing are Application, Website, and Database Server.

• Application: Test requests are sent properly to the Database whether the output placed at the client side is displayed properly or not. If any mistakes exist, they must get caught by the app and be showcased only to the administrator in place of the end-user.
• Web Server: Test Web Server is all about taking care of all application requests without service denial.
• Database Server: You need to ensure that the queries sent to the Database provide the best results. It is also about the Test system response at a time when the connectivity between the 3 layers (App, Web, and Database) couldn’t be established, and the right message would be shown to the final user.

If the connection between these can’t be established, a relevant message is displayed to the end-user.

4. Database Testing:

The Database is an important part of your web application, and you must try your best to test it properly while testing a website. Database Testing activities will include-

• You must test if errors pop up while executing queries.
• Data Integrity is considered while creating, updating, or removing data in the Database.
• Check the response time taken by the queries and fine-tune them if the need arises.
• Test data extracted from your Database is shown precisely in your web application.

5. Compatibility Testing:

Compatibility Tests ensure that your web app displays perfectly on all kinds of devices. This includes-

Browser Compatibility Test: The same website will display differently in another browser. You must first test whether your web app is displayed properly on browsers like JavaScript, AJAX and whether the authentication is functioning properly. You can also check the Mobile Browser Compatibility.

Web elements like the buttons, text fields, etc., are rendered, but the rendering alters with alterations in the Operating System. Therefore, you must ensure that your website works perfectly well for all the different combinations of Operating Systems like Windows, Linux, Mac, and Browsers like Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, etc.

6. Performance Testing:

This one makes sure that your site works fine under all loads. The Software Testing Activities for this one are:

• Website Application response times at various connection speed rates.
• Load Test your web app to understand its behavior under normal and excessive load.
• Stress Test your website to understand its breakpoint whenever stressed by excessive loads during the important time.
• You can test whenever a crash happens due to a high load to ensure that the site gets back to normal from this kind of event.
• You need to ensure that the optimization methods like the gzip compression, browser, and server-side cache are activated to bring down the load times.

7. Security Testing:

Security Testing is important for all e-commerce websites that maintain delicate customer information like credit cards. The Testing Activities for this must include-

• Test unauthorized access to safe pages must not be allowed.
• Restricted files must not be downloadable without perfect access.
• Check sessions lapse after long hours of user inactivity on their own.
• The website must be redirected to encrypted SSL pages using SSL certificates.

8. Crowd Testing:

In this case, you’ll get to choose from a huge group of people or a large crowd to implement tests that would otherwise have been executed by a small section of people in the company.

Crowdsourced Testing is a wonderful, new concept that helps unleash many hidden defects.

Conclusion

As a Web Tester, it’s vital to note that testing a website is a tedious procedure, and it’s normal for you to encounter innumerable hurdles. An important problem that you’ll come across is the deadline pressure. It becomes a tough job if the code is to be changed so many times. This is why you must ensure that you can manage your work and know what is expected from you. At Hikeqa, we have a talented team ready to help all startups and small teams struggling with Web Application Testing. Contact us for any queries.

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