
Introduction to Selenium IDE
Selenium IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is an Open source record and playback test automation tool for the web. This tool is basically add-on based which you can use in Firefox and Chrome browsers. You can also run your tests on any browser/OS combination in parallel using the Command Line Runner. You can create automation tests very easily and quickly through it’s record and playback functionality. Selenium IDE is a tool similar to UFT (Unified Functional Testing) by Microfocus.
As Selenium IDE doesn’t provide iteration or conditional statements for test scripts, it should only be used as a rapid prototyping tool, not the tool for creating complex automation tests.
Following are some of the striking features of Selenium IDE.
Resilient Tests
Selenium IDE records multiple locators for each element it interacts with. If one locator fails during playback, IDE will try others until one is successful.
Easy Debugging
It is very easy to set breakpoints and pausing on exceptions in Selenium IDE.
Cross Browser Execution
Tests can be run in any browser/OS using the Command Line Runner utility of Selenium IDE.
Test Case Reuse
Using the Run Command feature of Selenium IDE, you can reuse one test case inside of another.
Control Flow
Selenium IDE comes with an extensive control flow structure having available commands like if
, while
and times
.
Plugins
Selenium IDE can be extended through the use of plugins. They can introduce new commands to the IDE or integrate with a third-party service.
Though one can start working with Selenium IDE without having enough knowledge in programming but you have to have at least the basic idea of HTML, Javacript, Document Object Model (DOM) etc.