Selenium Testing: What The Future Holds?

Isn’t this an everyday scenario?

You are building a complex application with intricate architecture. Business requirements keep changing and the development and testing teams are always under immense pressure to design, build, test, simulate and deliver a high-quality defect-free product. 

However, you feel your team lacks skills in effectively testing the applications in a short span of time which in turn is hampering the overall product time-to-market. Due to the relentless need for faster releases, teams need to balance between speed and quality. 

So what do you possibly need to help your testing teams with so that they gain the competitive edge?

Automated testing = An Automation framework + Speed + Agility + Scalability

You need a strong automated testing framework that can help you transform testing into a continuous and efficient end-to-end quality engineering function. 

Most of the teams use Selenium for their automation testing needs. Tools like WebDriver, Selenium Grid, Selenium Integrated Development Environment (IDE), and Selenium Remote Control (RC) are popular.

Why is Selenium so Popular?

The Selenium testing tool is used to automate tests across browsers for web applications. It offers many benefits and due to these multiple features, Selenium is still considered to be a promising automation testing tool for the future.

• Flexibility: Selenium is a tool that is widely used for its flexibility when needed to perform functionality tests or rapid regression testing.
• Multi-Language Support: Selenium allows users to test codes written in C++, Java, Python, and Ruby, offering extensive language support.
• Cross-browser compatibility: Selenium supports test case implementation across different browsers.
• Open-source: It is an open-source framework and it’s free! The selenium users can leverage the platform.

Challenges of Selenium Testing

Although Selenium offers a pretty stable environment for automation testing, there are many bottlenecks. These pain points can have an impact on the overall testing efficiency.

Selenium & The Future of Software Testing – Driving Value with Intelligent Automation

To overcome these challenges, you need more predictive and intelligent testing approaches based on automation and innovation. Next-gen technologies like AI and ML are transforming the testing industry and helping to propagate improved testing capabilities.

According to Gartner,  By the end of 2024, 75% of organizations will shift from piloting to operationalizing artificial intelligence (AI), driving a 5 times increase in streaming data and analytics infrastructures.

AI-based technology is helping enhance testing with the following capabilities:

1. Automated Test Case Creation/ Script Creation

For you to test your application precisely, you need test data that is similar to production data. However, creating such data sets is one of the biggest challenges the testers face. 

With the advances in AI, we can eliminate such inefficiencies. AI can easily generate test data for you by analyzing the UI and identifying a series of test cases that predict user behavior! 

Test data is the generation of data that comes as close as possible to your production data without revealing any sensitive information – all guided by artificial intelligence and analytics.

2. Test Maintenance

If you need to run automated tests, then you also need to invest in test maintenance. With every change in the application, you need test maintenance for the existing tests. This is the greatest bottleneck in the testing process. 

With AI, you need not worry about maintaining the test suite and test script. The self-healing capability helps you detect the problem before they arise!

3. API Testing

APIs are the behind-the-scenes of an application and hence testing them is very crucial for the application’s functionality. However, testing API requires a high degree of specialized technical skills along with domain and architectural knowledge. API Testers need to spend a lot of time understanding how the API works and building test cases.
Using AI for API Testing can take out this complexity and give a significant boost to the quality of testing. The AI can analyze and build API tests and scenarios – without the need for the tester to have an in-depth understanding of the architecture.

4. Image/Visual Testing

The first thing a user notices is your application’s UI. When new changes are introduced, the application’s UI keeps changing – either due to the ever-changing requirements or during the integration or build process. The changes could be as minor as the color change, shape, and size of the buttons and text! It’s highly difficult to validate these changes manually on every page.

AI and ML help in recognizing the patterns in images and help in detecting the differences, making UI testing faster and more reliable. 
Healenium is a testing framework that improves the stability of Selenium-based tests. Web applications are constantly updated. So all automated UI tests will face locator changes due to the web page changes. It’s an AI-powered library that solves and fixes locator changes. As the locator issues are fixed in run time, it improves the stability of the automated tests and ensures your CI/CD pipeline is always Green.

5. Self-Healing Capability

Test flakiness – the enemy of every tester! 

The reasons for test flakiness could be anything – no correct testing framework, lack of maintenance, dynamic elements, co-dependent or badly written tests. And if you are using Selenium, incorrect object identifiers are always going to be an issue. This is because Selenium does not have any self-healing capability that can identify such flaky elements and fix them. The automation may fail due to the predefined test scripts. It is then very difficult to identify which test cases should be modified or added. 

Fret not! The AI ML power combo can help you overcome this flakiness. With the self-healing capability added to the framework, it can learn if there is a change made, and then automatically modify the test automation script to fix the problem.

Tools like Webomates-CQ apply AI and ML algorithms to the self-healing test automation framework to dynamically adapt their testing scope to the changes. 

With their 2 phase healing – 

1. Detection Phase –  Their Test Package analyzer detects the requirements change and impact to test cases and the Defect Analyzer detects the script level changes/abnormalities in the existing code and automatically fixes them without human intervention.
2. Generation Phase – This involves analyzing and regenerating the test cases and scripts.

The Way Forward

The testing industry started using Automation and AI in dribs and drabs – either to handle repetitive tasks or automate routine functions. Today companies are avant-garde in AI – meaning they are in favor of introducing new and experimental ideas and methods to increase the testing efficiency. 

Adding AI and ML to testing has empowered the development and testing teams to improve efficiency across functional and non-functional aspects of the application. 

With Continuous Testing at the center stage of all software development activities, these innovative AI and MLpowered tools and technologies help to speed up the release cycles by identifying, predicting, and rectifying defects even before they reach the customers.

What’s In It For You?

If you want to execute different types of software tests in a limited timeframe, with detailed analysis and insights, Webomates-CQ is the right tool for you!

To solve complex issues, we have innovative AI solutions like defect prediction, test case maintenance, codeless testing, exploratory testing, test insights, and many more.

Webomates CQ is an ingenious AI-based testing tool that delivers all of the above with the service level guarantees to support its claims.

Webomates provides intelligent automation solutions with intelligent analytics. It leverages the power of data processing, analysis, reasoning, and machine learning to provide an end-to-end testing solution for your business.

If you are looking for a one-stop solution for your testing needs then look no further, reach out to us at info@webomates.com.

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Tags: AI Testing, Intelligent automation, Selenium Testing, Selenium Testing Future, Test Automation