The Next Generation IDE - Selenium IDE 4 is officially released.

I was thinking for few days on writing a blog but was not quite sure about what should I write about. And then I came to know a happy news which could also make a lot of other test engineers also happy. Well let me tell you what it is all about. 

As you all may know, back in August Selenium has officially announced the deprecation of Selenium IDE. If we talk about the user statistics, Selenium IDE was having: 

• 3,000,000+ downloads 
• 150,000+ weekly users
• 1000+ daily installations

For those who don't know about the selenium IDE, It is an open-source record-playback tool for the web. The IDE was utilized by many test automation experts around the globe, and then they don't had any proper tool to get help with. I was also a bit sad about this since I was depending on this tool for finding custom locators, but for me it turn around well because then I learned to write locators without depending on any tool. Well that's my case, but there might be a lot of other test engineers who still find it very hard. 

 But now it's back with new look and pretty cool features. Selenium IDE has now got a pretty good upgrade and Simon Stewart, Selenium Project Lead and Creator of WebDriver, revealed the new Selenium IDE in a special live session, including capabilities, features, and roadmap. They call it Selenium IDE 4.0 which also will be a great supporting factor for the Selenium Webdriver ver 4.0 which is in beta stage. 

Selenium IDE 4 also known as Selenium IDE TNG will be a web extension and it is standardized with the W3C and hence it could be run in any browsers compared to the old version. The UI still remains somewhat similar to what we had before. Also they have made some great improvisations in terms of locators and better support for common tasks. 

For continuous integration purpose they have also implemented a new selenium ide runner which is a command line tool which is great for parallel executions, grid executions and can also be configured through capabilities. 

You can install the runner by simply running the following command:

npm install -g selenium- side-runner 

or

yarn global add selenium- side-runner

And another great feature is the usage of control flow. Earlier we were not able to use the control flow statement/conditions like if loop, while loops etc. Now you can use condition based statemets in the selenium ide for getting things done more efficiently. 

Another key feature which we need to mention is the usage of fallback locators. Now when you record it will also save about 5 different other locators that will be in action id any fallback condition is happening. That means if you find you page changing frequently with new id's or attributes, u need not worry because any of the other locators can be used. I am sure that these features are gonna give a better stability to our tests. 

You can also create custom plugins for adding new commands, locators, control set up and tear down etc, which is another cool feature. You can have a look on the wiki to know more about how to do execute it effectively. It is really well explained there. 

Their roadmap also include pretty cool features like Exporting tests to programming languages, Empowered data driven testing etc. 

You can download the latest version of Selenium IDE by clicking these link: 

Useful Links

• Selenium IDE for Chrome
• Selenium IDE for FireFox
• Instructions for creating a new command (or plugin) for IDE can be found here. 
• People interested in getting the code for IDE itself can go the Selenium IDE page on GitHub.

Happy Testing, Stay tuned!

How to choose the Best Programming language for Test Automation with Selenium

Quite a few weeks, back, I got a question from one of my contacts in linkedin. 

So I just thought of writing this blog post to give an overview of the programming languages that every beginner should prefer while it comes to learn Selenium. Actually speaking, I would say the language doesn’t matter at all. 89% of the concepts you learn in one language can be applied to any other language. First select any language that you are comfirtable with, roll up your sleeves, and jump in. That's it :)

In Dima Kovalenko’s book Selenium Design Patterns and Best Practices, he discusses how the common Selenium command sendkeys translates in most of the other major Selenium Language bindings. Check out the example below:

This uniformity between the different Selenium language bindings applies to most of the commands in the Selenium API. So, it's really easy to transfer your knowledge of one programming language approach to another using Selenium without much effort. 

Well I can also give some tips as follows for selecting the language for test automation.

♦ The community for the specific programming language of your automation framework. ie. if you use selenium webdriver, Language support of JAVA is %68, JS %15, Python %11, %5 Ruby, %1 C# [Reference: Dave Haeffner’s SauceLabs Event Presentation].

♦ You should check which version is stable and get the updates first. For selenium, I think the JAVA bindings are getting updated at first.

♦ You should check the availability of the language support in StackOverflow.

♦ Visual Test Automation support.

♦ You should consider your competency of Programming Language which will be used in automation project.

♦ You should consider Test Runner frameworks and their capabilities such as JUnit, TestNG, NUnit, MBUnit, etc.

♦ You should consider how you can run your tests in parallel without any pain.

♦ You should consider your product/organisation programming language. In this way, you will get help from developers. If they write unit tests, that will be great! :slight_smile:

♦ Also consider the API Testing libraries of that programming language.

♦ Now-a-days BDD is a much used concept and hence the BDD support of that language should be considered.

♦ I personally feel that if you have never programmed before, it would be best to start by using a script-friendly language like Python or Ruby. Using a scripting language allows you to learn to write Selenium tests with the least amount of code in the shortest amount of time.

My final answer/recommendation:

So, to recap: What language should you use to learn Selenium?

The answer is that there is no such specific answer — but I really hope this article would help you narrow down, which language is right for your personal situation.

And may be you should consider many more items to select a programming language for test automation. If you have any feedback, please share with me in the comment section below.

Happy Testing!