Automating Functional Testing using Selenium

Development teams work under a lot of pressure to deliver the products at a great speed for high-quality output. Because the application won't go live only if the UI looks good. It goes live only after testing the product using multiple cases. In some cases, the developers/tester may miss cross-checking of application functionality due to the availability of multiple features in an application. So to avoid such problems, testers opt for automation testing rather than manual testing. Today in this article, I'll be sharing the details of automating functional testing using selenium

Before going to know about the automation of functional testing, let us start our discussion with

What is Functional Testing?

This is a kind of testing done by the testers to test the functionality of the application to check with the functional requirements (or) the specifications. Through this test, you can test all the functions in the web applications to make sure that all the requirements were satisfied by the web application. This functional testing involves multiple black-box testing techniques where there was nothing to do with application source code. Various functions that were tested during this functional testing include Databases, APIs, User Interfaces, Security, Client-Server Communication, and many other small components.

This kind of testing is meant for testing the functionality of the application. These tests include the main functions of web applications ensuring basic usability where the users can navigate through the web application without any difficulties. Additionally through this testing,  you can get the pop-up of the right error messages whenever a new error condition occurs.

Steps involved in Functional Testing:

There are numerous steps involved in automated functional testing of the web applications such as :

• Determining the functional components of the web application that needs to be tested, that includes the accessibility, basic usability as well as the error conditions
• Creating the input data for functionality testing, post the determination of the main component of testing.
• Determining the expected output for the functionality based on the input data.
• Executing the test cases that were created for functional testing.
• Comparing the output results with the expected results and if the outcome is similar to the expected results then functional testing is successful.

Automated Functional testing using Selenium:

Selenium is not a single utility. It is a combination of four different tools i.e Selenium IDE, Selenium Web Driver, Selenium RC, and Selenium Grid. All these tools were used according to test the functionality of the application.

Automated Functional testing using Selenium can be done through the following steps:

• Create a Web Driver test case
• Go to a specific web page for testing
• Find the HTML Elements for testing on the web
• Act with HTML instance
• Await for the browser response for an action
• Run the test and record the output with the test framework
• Stop the test

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Types of Functional Testing:

Multiple test cases can be carried out based on the user's requirement. These different functional test types were often automated for a faster release of the web application. Among the multiple functional testing, the prominent functional testing were:

Unit Testing:

It is usually performed by developers to achieve the specific functionality for each unit of application. During this testing, the developer will make sure that each component of the application works as intended. This unit test always provides the additional test to identify the components that cause problems. Many developers say, it is always preferred to find the bugs as early as possible. Because it will be harder to diagnose the entire process as a whole. This testing was one of the most important automated functional testing, where the developers can test the functionality of each component of the application and can verify. This is helpful to deliver the products faster with better quality.

Smoke Testing:

This is performed on the new release of any software, to ensure the functionality of the basic working of the application. During this testing, the most crucial components and the application functionality were covered. A web application is considered to be stable only if passes the smoke test. Once it's done, the tester can perform the functional testing for the newly added features and then execute the regression testing based on the scenario. If the smoke test fails, the current release is not stable and needs to be fixed

Regression Testing:

This testing is mainly intended to identify the bugs that were entered into the code with the addition of new features (or) functionalities. Once testing is done it ensures that the functionality of the application is not affected by the new code. For example, consider a scenario where the person working in a visitor management system has added a new feature in the latest release, that generates a report of all visitors that fall into the respective category.

Once the smoke test is done for a release, you need to perform regression testing, to ensure the code from the older release does not create any bugs. This kind of testing often becomes challenging for testers, because the tester needs to execute the test for every change they made. And performing this test multiple times will be time-consuming, hence the testers opt for Selenium test automation over regression testing.

Sanity Testing:

This testing ensures that modification in the new build has fixed the issues without having additional bugs. Since Smoke and the Sanity testing sounds similar many testers often get confused with this kind of testing. But there is a little difference between them. Smoke testing performs end-to-end functionalities of the web application, whereas sanity testing is performed to verify the new functionalities of the web application.

Integration Testing:

It ensure that all the modules were working fine and don’t show any bugs when integrated. This test allows the operational commands and data to act as a whole system rather than individual components. This kind of test is usually done to find issues with the API Calls,  UI Operations, Data formats, and Databases access.

System Testing:

System testing refers to checking the entire web application to evaluate the application performance with the given requirements. It is performed after executing the integration testing. This part of testing is considered the critical part of functional testing as it verifies the operational, practical, and business  requirements of the application

Cross Browser Testing:

This is the final phase of application testing that performs similarly across all the platforms. Because there might be a case, where the application renders differently across different web browsers. Hence to achieve the same rendering functionality, testers perform this kind of testing before the launch of the application.

Like wises there are few other kinds of testing that the application testers perform. Do you want to know the rest of those practices? If yes, enroll for the best Selenium Online Course offered by KITS Online Training Real-Time industry experts by interacting with the live test cases. Besides, also check out Selenium Interview Question and get placed in an MNC.