The Selenium automation framework is a great tool-set for automating interactions with the browser. Because of its powerful open source features and standard adoption across many browsers, Selenium has become the most popular web testing framework in the world. You can run your automated testing scripts in a variety of languages against local browsers, a lab of browsers and devices using Selenium Grid, or a device cloud like CrossBrowserTesting. To get the most out of automation, we’ve put together five Selenium best practices for browser testing.

Use The Right Locators

At the heart of the Selenium framework is interaction with the browser, letting you navigate, click, type and check different objects within the DOM using a few set actions. It does this using several different types of locators:

• Class
• ID
• Link Text
• PartPartial Link Textial
• Tag Name
• X Path

Selecting the right locators can be the difference between a test script that is flexible and successful, and a brittle test that breaks on the slightest UI change. If they are present, use unique Classes or IDs as Selenium locators, as they are less likely to change without someone on your QA or Dev team knowing. But locators like link text can change all the time – think about a dynamic button based on logged in state, or your marketing team running A/B tests. You can also use Xpath to navigate the webdriver, you can read more about Xpath to CSS conversion here.

Communication Between QA, Developers, Marketers, and Designers is Key

There are two aspects of collaborating with different teams that can make your Selenium testing a success: constant communication and instilling the importance of testing to every department. Instilling the importance of the QA process on your development team can save time and efficiency when building a testing framework. Make sure they know how important unique CSS selectors are to your testing efforts, and ask them to write semantic and human-friendly code. Having constant communication across teams can help QA plan for changes to the UI of a website or application mandated by Marketing or the Design team. Having small conversations about the front-end aspect of your app decreases the chance of surprise UI changes that will go untested.

Page Object Model. Use it.

A popular test automation design pattern, the page object model will help you make robust testing frameworks that are resistant to small tweaks in the UI. The page object model has two core advantages:

1. There is clean separation between test code and page specific code such as locators (or their use if you’re using a UI map) and layout.
2.  There is single repository for the services or operations offered by the page rather than having these services scattered through out the tests.

In both cases this allows any modifications required due to UI changes to all be made in one place. See SeleniumEasy’s explanation and example:

Make Tests Independent Of Each Other

Testing one single action or process, independent of any other tests is known as atomic testing. This testing strategy will keep you from making chained, brittle tests. Chaining together tests, while saving time upfront, can be a huge blocker for a truly agile or CI workflow. Keep tests as small as possible.

Use Your Resources

Selenium best practices can be tough to learn because it requires a certain amount of tangential knowledge. You have to have some understanding of programming and to truly be a skilled Selenium tester, an understanding of test automation best practices. Luckily, there are some fantastic resources available on the internet to learn from. While we run monthly webinars to get you up and running with Selenium best practices, here are a few of our favorites:

• SeleniumEasy
• Automate The Planet

It’s Open Source…And Free.

Selenium is an Open Source automation framework built for web-browser testing by some of the brightest developers tired of scripting with expensive legacy automation tools not truly built for the web. Because of this, Selenium’s community is vibrant, growing and is seen as one of the real strength’s of the tool. It has become the most reliable web automation tool because of the ease of generating test scripts to validate functionality. Selenium also works with testing frameworks like WebDriver.IO, Nightwatch.js, and countless others. Oh, and it’s free, with no upfront costs.

One Script for True Cross Browser Testing

With only one script Selenium can test Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, Opera, and Internet Explorer on almost any platform available: Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and iOS. Customers are using an increasing amount of devices, as they become cheaper and more powerful. Keep up and improve your test coverage with just one script.

Works with The Languages You Use

You can use your favorite language with Selenium, so testing starts right away. With support for Java, JavaScript, C#, PHP, Ruby, Python and Perl you’ll avoid the hassle of learning another programming language just to start browser testing.

Easy to Learn and Scale

You’re not alone! With an incredibly vibrant, growing community, Selenium tutorials, testing, and development help is usually just a short search away. The documentation at SeleniumHQ is helpful, and there countless tutorials and how-to sites for you to quickly learn “Selenese”. You can even use Selenium IDE, a Firefox Record and Replay extension, to generate scripts! Selenium was built to scale with their local testing Grid, so you can be assured that as your application grows, so too will your test coverage. Here are a few of our favorite tutorial sites for Selenium:

• SeleniumEasy
• AutomateThePlanet
• LearnAutomation

Integrations for Every Stage of Testing

Selenium has a solid foundation of standards that make it able to be used easily with popular software development and testing tools. Integrate easily with SC compilers like Maven and ANT, CI systems like Jenkins or TeamCity, cloud-grids like CrossBrowserTesting, and almost any test management tool.