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How to Learn Selenium – A Complete Roadmap

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Web Development is indeed one of the most high-paying jobs and is also in great demand. But building a website isn’t just enough, developers also have a team of testers who find bugs and try to rectify them. Bugs are obvious and hence, testing the software is needed. When it comes to testing, Selenium is one of the best tools to help developers with automation testing. Thus, the demand for Selenium testers is high and will also increase in the near future.

Selenium Tester Learning Path

You’ll be surprised to know that the average salary of a Selenium tester is 7 LPA and it also ranges from 4 LPA to 15 LPA as per the experience. In this article, you’ll get to know everything that requires you to become a Selenium tester. But before that, let’s understand What is Selenium?

Selenium is an open-source tool and a suite of tools that can automate actions on web browsers. Each tool is to support specific automation. It supports scripting in 10 different programming languages like Ruby, Java, NodesJS, Python, PHP, and C#. The most important tools of selenium are Selenium IDE, Selenium WebDriver, and Selenium Grid.

Advantages of Using Selenium 

Selenium is an open source. There is no licensing cost involved and it can be downloaded for free. It is becoming one of the most preferred web testing frameworks and also

  • No Initial Investment.
  • No need for Trained Programmers.
  • Test Driver Development, Continuous Integration (CI), & Continuous Testing (CT)

Who is a Selenium Tester?

The work of a Selenium Tester depends on the role, company to another, from one project to another, and even also varies according to a year of experience.  There are some standard responsibilities of a Selenium Tester. 

  • Understand the requirements and functionality of the client/user.
  • Knowledge of Regression and Functional Testing.
  • Knowledge of the Selenium suite of tools like Selenium IDE, Selenium Grid, and Selenium WebDriver.
  • Test Automation Framework.
  • Create Test cases and able to execute them.
  • To fix errors, resolve queries if any also debug the test cases.

If you want or thinking of pursuing a career in the web testing field, then there are various Selenium career opportunities. Selenium helps developers with automating testing.

There are many Career Opportunities as a Selenium Developer:

  • Automation Test Engineer
  • QA Manager/REMOTE – (Automation/Selenium)
  • SDET / QA Engineer  
  • Quality Assurance Selenium remote
  • Senior Java SDET
  • Test Engineer  
  • Selenium Automation Lead
  • QA Analyst  

You must have lots of questions pop up How to start? Where to start? What do we need to learn before beginning Selenium? In this article, we will discuss all these things in detail.

Roadmap to Learn Selenium

Learning Selenium is not that much difficult, it requires a good command is any of the programming languages and practice properly. So, To understand or before starting to learn Selenium you should have some good commands on any programming language, HTML, Unit testing, TestNg, and Framework to learn Selenium for Automation testing. Let’s discuss all these in more detail.

Step 1: Learn Any Programming Language – you should know basic knowledge about any programming language. Taking Java as an example. First, you should have a proper installation and setting up Eclipse for practice. 

The first thing you need to learn is Core Java. So, you need to learn the following major topics:

Some Advance Java concepts of Java need to cover to be aware of all these concepts along with basic concepts 

  • Collection FrameworkA framework is a set of classes and interfaces which provide a ready-made architecture. To implement a new feature or a class, there is no need to define a framework.
  • Local Date and Time LocalDateTime in Java is used for displaying the local date and time on the output screen.
  • Lambda Expressions and Stream Java 8 introduced a host of new features, including lambda functions and streams.
  • JDBC (Java Database Connectivity)Java Database Connectivity is a Java API to connect and execute the query with the database

Step 2: IDE and Build Tools – Once you cover all the core and advanced java and start to practice therefore you must know the following IDE’s

Now all your java code is built. So, for building your Java project you must be aware of Maven (build tool). 
 

Step 3: Learn DataBase Management System Knowledge of Database Management System (DBMS) is good to go. Listed down all the important topics which need to cover before starting with Selenium 

Step 4: Learn Fundamentals of HTML – You should have basic knowledge and some practice, as while working with selenium You would need to find out locators of web elements like radio, links, text boxes, checkboxes, etc.

Step 5: Know about Testing Basics and Testing Management – Knowledge about basic concepts of software testing that are to be understood by anyone who is going to work on a software testing project. List down some concepts 

  • The need for Software Testing
  • Basics Concepts and Terminologies
  • How Software Testing is Done
  • Requirement Analysis Phase
  • Test Planning and Design Phase
  • Test Execution Phase
  • Test Closure Phase

Step 6: Developing Persistence Layer of Enterprise Application using HibernateHibernate Framework is a very popular persistence layer framework for developing Java enterprise applications.

Hibernate is a Java-based, open-source, Object Relational Mapping (ORM) framework.

Step 7: Start with Selenium – Selenium is a suite of tools that can automate actions on web browsers. Each tool is developed to support a specific kind of automation approach. For more information do read Selenium Basics – Components, Features, Uses, and Limitations

There important tools that form the core of the Selenium ecosystem are:

  • Selenium IDE
  • Selenium WebDriver
  • Selenium Grid
Tools  Features of tools that are the core of Selenium
Selenium IDE
  • Have no prior knowledge of programming.
  • Automated test scripts have to be created in the quickest possible way.
Selenium WebDriver
  • Skilled programmers, who can handle code using object-oriented APIs.
  • Test automation involves complex functionalities like UIs built using HTML5, etc.
  • Developing advanced automation frameworks which need features.
Selenium Grid
  • Multiple tests can run in parallel on multiple machines to reduce overall execution time.
  • Tests need to be distributed across multiple machines to check for application compatibility 

Step 8: Selenium Basics – Start with learning Locators and WebDrivers

There are many different ways to find web elements like ID, Name, Class Name, Link text, Partial Link text, CSS, and XPath. 

You have to learn commands on WebDrivers and their real-time knowledge. Some commonly used WebDriver Like Google Chrome Driver, Internet Explorer Driver, Opera Driver, Safari Driver, and HTML Unit Driver

 You can first target the simple things to learn Selenium Basics:

  • WebDriver and Locators
  • Browser Commands
  • Get Commands
  • Browser Navigation Commands
  • Web Element Commands
  • Select Dropdown Commands
  • Actions Class
  • Selenium Waits
  • Take a Screenshot in Selenium
  • Handle Alerts or Pop-ups

Step 9: Testing – Testing is the process of verifying and validating the functionality of an application to make sure that it works as per the requirements and does not have a bug/error. It is the responsibility of the developer to test the module or method that he/she has developed before the code is integrated with others’ code. 

The most commonly used unit testing frameworks are JUnit and TestNG.

Step 10: Selenium Advance – Now move to learn advanced concepts to be better commanding in Selenium Framework. Learn the following components which will help you in creating a maintainable framework/script in Selenium.

i) Work with TestNG Framework – TestNG (Test Next Generation) is an open-source automated testing framework. It is similar to JUnit, but it is not a JUnit extension.

ii) Enhance Test Scripts – 

  • XPath axes – An XPath expression is an alphanumeric pattern that returns a node or a set of nodes in the given XML/HTML document. 
  • SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) – SSL is a standard security protocol that is used to establish a secured connection between the server and the client end.
  • JDBC (Java DataBase Connectivity)

iii) Log Reports using Log 4j – Apache Log 4j is a Java-based logging utility that is used for logging execution information.

  • Logger
  • Layout
  • Appender

iv) Build Automation using Maven – Working with Maven is to build the project more automated and Independent.

v) Build triggers using Jenkins – Jenkins is an open-source continuous integration tool used on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS environments. 

vi) Automation Framework – An automation framework is a combination of various guidelines, coding standards, project hierarchies, modularity, reporting mechanism, test data injections, etc. to pillar automation testing. 

  • Some concepts in the Automation Framework 
  • Create Test Cases 
  • Create and Execute Test Batches
  • Tracking and Reporting Errors/Defects
  • Regression Testing 

vii) Cross-browser testing using Selenium Grid – Selenium grid is part of the selenium suite which distributes the test across multiple physical or virtual machines for the test scripts can be executed in parallel (Simultaneously). It helps us in covering the test process across browsers and different platforms.

Step 11: Practice – You should keep practicing all the above topics to understand the real-time implementation of selenium. 

Some Selenium Practice Exercise

  • Automate Google Search with Selenium.
  • Login to Email using username and password automatically.
  • Send an Email Automatically using Selenium.
  • Automate Demo Web Table with Selenium.

Conclusion 

In order to become a Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET). Selenium is the most necessary. Begin your journey in this field, you will keep growing. While working with Selenium Automation, upskill and keep yourself learning every day. Does not need much effort into learning new automation tools (Selenium), once you worked for 2-3 years in selenium.



Last Updated : 13 Dec, 2022
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