White Paper on Software Testing Using Selenium
COURTESY :- vrindawan.in
Wikipedia
Software testing is the act of examining the artifacts and the behavior of the software under test by validation and verification. Software testing can also provide an objective, independent view of the software to allow the business to appreciate and understand the risks of software implementation. Test techniques include, but not necessarily limited to:
- analyzing the product requirements for completeness and correctness in various contexts like industry perspective, business perspective, feasibility and viability of implementation, usability, performance, security, infrastructure considerations, etc.
- reviewing the product architecture and the overall design of the product
- working with product developers on improvement in coding techniques, design patterns, tests that can be written as part of code based on various techniques like boundary conditions, etc.
- executing a program or application with the intent of examining behavior
- reviewing the deployment infrastructure and associated scripts and automation
- take part in production activities by using monitoring and observability techniques
Software testing can provide objective, independent information about the quality of software and risk of its failure to users or sponsors.
Although software testing can determine the correctness of software under the assumption of some specific hypotheses (see the hierarchy of testing difficulty below), testing cannot identify all the failures within the software. Instead, it furnishes a criticism or comparison that compares the state and behavior of the product against test oracles — principles or mechanisms by which someone might recognize a problem. These oracles may include (but are not limited to) specifications, contracts, comparable products, past versions of the same product, inferences about intended or expected purpose, user or customer expectations, relevant standards, applicable laws, or other criteria.
A primary purpose of testing is to detect software failures so that defects may be discovered and corrected. Testing cannot establish that a product functions properly under all conditions, but only that it does not function properly under specific conditions. The scope of software testing may include the examination of code as well as the execution of that code in various environments and conditions as well as examining the aspects of code: does it do what it is supposed to do and do what it needs to do. In the current culture of software development, a testing organization may be separate from the development team. There are various roles for testing team members. Information derived from software testing may be used to correct the process by which software is developed.
Every software product has a target audience. For example, the audience for video game software is completely different from banking software. Therefore, when an organization develops or otherwise invests in a software product, it can assess whether the software product will be acceptable to its end users, its target audience, its purchasers, and other stakeholders. Software testing assists in making this assessment.
Software faults occur through the following process: A programmer makes an error (mistake), which results in a fault (defect, bug) in the software source code. If this fault is executed, in certain situations the system will produce wrong results, causing a failure.
Not all faults will necessarily result in failures. For example, faults in the dead code will never result in failures. A fault that did not reveal failures may result in a failure when the environment is changed. Examples of these changes in environment include the software being run on a new computer hardware platform, alterations in source data, or interacting with different software. A single fault may result in a wide range of failure symptoms.
Not all software faults are caused by coding errors. One common source of expensive defects is requirement gaps, that is, unrecognized requirements that result in errors of omission by the program designer. Requirement gaps can often be non-functional requirements such as test ability, scalability, maintainability, performance, and security.
A fundamental problem with software testing is that testing under all combinations of inputs and preconditions (initial state) is not feasible, even with a simple product. This means that the number of faults in a software product can be very large and defects that occur infrequently are difficult to find in testing and debugging. More significantly, non-functional dimensions of quality (how it is supposed to be versus what it is supposed to do) — usability, scalability, performance, compatibility, and reliability — can be highly subjective; something that constitutes sufficient value to one person may be intolerable to another.
Software developers can’t test everything, but they can use combinatorial test design to identify the minimum number of tests needed to get the coverage they want. Combinatorial test design enables users to get greater test coverage with fewer tests. Whether they are looking for speed or test depth, they can use combinatorial test design methods to build structured variation into their test cases.
A study conducted by NIST in 2002 reports that software bugs cost the U.S. economy $59.5 billion annually. More than a third of this cost could be avoided, if better software testing was performed.
Outsourcing software testing because of costs is very common, with China, the Philippines, and India, being preferred destinations.
Software testing can be done by dedicated software testers; until the 1980s, the term “software tester” was used generally, but later it was also seen as a separate profession. Regarding the periods and the different goals in software testing, different roles have been established, such as test manager, test lead, test analyst, test designer, tester, automation developer, and test administrator. Software testing can also be performed by non-dedicated software testers.
Selenium is an open source umbrella project for a range of tools and libraries aimed at supporting browser automation. It provides a playback tool for authoring functional tests across most modern web browsers, without the need to learn a test scripting language (Selenium IDE). It also provides a test domain-specific language (Selenese) to write tests in a number of popular programming languages, including JavaScript (Node.js), C#, Groovy, Java, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby and Scala. Selenium runs on Windows, Linux, and mac OS. It is open-source software released under the Apache License 2.0.
Selenium was originally developed by Jason Huggins in 2004 as an internal tool at Thought Works. Huggins was later joined by other programmers and testers at Thought Works, before Paul Hammant joined the team and steered the development of the second mode of operation that would later become “Selenium Remote Control” (RC). The tool was open sourced that year.
In 2005 Dan Fabulich and Nelson Sproul (with help from Pat Lightbody) made an offer to accept a series of patches that would transform Selenium-RC into what it became best known for. In the same meeting, the steering of Selenium as a project would continue as a committee, with Huggins and Hammant being the Thought Works representatives.
In 2007, Huggins joined Google. Together with others like Jennifer Bevan, he continued with the development and stabilization of Selenium RC. At the same time, Simon Stewart at ThoughtWorks developed a superior browser automation tool called WebDriver. In 2009, after a meeting between the developers at the Google Test Automation Conference, it was decided to merge the two projects, and call the new project Selenium Web Driver, or Selenium 2.0.
In 2008, Philippe Hanrigou (then at Thought Works) made “Selenium Grid”, which provides a hub allowing the running of multiple Selenium tests concurrently on any number of local or remote systems, thus minimizing test execution time. Grid offered, as open source, a similar capability to the internal/private Google cloud for Selenium RC. Pat Light body had already made a private cloud for “HostedQA” which he went on to sell to Gomez, Inc.
The name Selenium comes from a joke made by Huggins in an email, mocking a competitor named Mercury, saying that you can cure mercury poisoning by taking selenium supplements. The others that received the email took the name and ran with it.
Selenium is composed of several components with each taking on a specific role in aiding the development of web application test automation.
Selenium IDE is a complete integrated development environment (IDE) for Selenium tests. It is implemented as a Firefox Add-On and as a Chrome Extension. It allows for recording, editing and debugging of functional tests. It was previously known as Selenium Recorder. Selenium-IDE was originally created by Shinya Kasatani and donated to the Selenium project in 2006. Selenium IDE began being actively maintained in 2018.
Scripts may be automatically recorded and edited manually providing autocompletion support and the ability to move commands around quickly. Scripts are recorded in Selenese, a special test scripting language for Selenium. Selenese provides commands for performing actions in a browser (click a link, select an option) and for retrieving data from the resulting pages.
The 2.x version of the Selenium IDE for Firefox stopped working after the Firefox 55 upgrade and has been replaced by Selenium IDE 3.x.
In addition to the official Selenium IDE project, two alternative Selenium IDE browser extensions are actively maintained: Kantu (Open-Source GPL license) and Katalon Recorder (Open-Source).