Top 7 Most Popular Challenges Faced In Selenium Test Automation

Selenium is an excellent automation tool, however, there are some obstacles to overcome before using it for automation testing.

It is an open-source tool, and various enterprises are concerned about the lack of guaranteed support. This is not particularly true in the case of Selenium. Though Selenium is open-source software, it has an online community, which is well endowed with solid sponsors. Selenium was designed primarily to support only web applications.

Some of these applications can be extended and automated. To perform meaningful automation, an automation specialist with strong programming skills is required. Due to its scripted nature, the cost of automation maintenance could be expensive if not coded efficiently. There are no built-in test management integration capabilities, as seen in other popular software. However, there are plug-ins and extensions available to help with these issues. Automation may take longer if skilled developers are not available.

Challenges and Limitations of using Selenium

1. System pop-ups

Pop-ups that appear on the screen during automation testing are part of the operating system, which makes it difficult for Selenium to automate these in web applications. Due to this reason, Selenium’s inability to automate any system software such as Windows-based alerts is quite obvious.

2. Lack of good reporting

Every tester requires a good testing report post-execution of a test, which helps them to analyze the entire test scenario and find bugs. Without a doubt, Selenium can vastly improve automated testing capabilities, but due to some limitations, it is unable to generate good testing reports.

3. Timeout Issue

One of the most common Selenium test automation challenges a timeout issue. It is extremely critical to deal with this issue with extreme care. Most of your testing scripts may fail if you do not handle this issue carefully. Majority of testing scripts malfunction due to improper synchronization while performing automation testing. Testers can use some inbuilt features meant for this purpose such as Implicit waits and Explicit waits, which are available within Selenium.

4. **Cross Browser Testing **

Selenium is a multilingual and cross-platform compatible testing software, which is widely used for, automated cross-browser testing of web apps. However, testers sometimes have noticed that Selenium fails to run an automation test for certain browsers which hampers cross-browser testing to a significant level. It is critical to ensure that web apps should work properly and correctly in all browsers otherwise the risk of losing a high traffic rate is inevitable. To deal with this problem, Selenium test scripts should run multiple times on different browsers and results should be constantly examined.

5. Mobile apps testing

Selenium does not support mobile app testing on operating systems such as Android and iOS. It only allows testers to test web apps on other operating systems and browsers. Android and iOS are mostly used web platforms nowadays, hence this restriction limits Selenium’s capability to a major extent. An alternative solution to this problem is to use Appium, which is an open-source automation-testing framework that drives native as well as hybrid iOS and Android mobile apps using the Web Driver protocol.

6. Loading issue

Certain web pages in some web apps are user-specific, which load according to the user profile. The display of some features is based on the user’s previous activity. Sometimes Selenium script is not able to identify the user-specific element during execution. To solve this problem, the tester can use explicit waits to give enough time to load and discover the element.

7. Scalability

Selenium is not considered the most scalable solution for automation testing. Comprehensive test coverage in the shortest amount of time is essential for automation testing which makes it essential to run as many tests as possible in a limited time. Selenium, as an open-source platform, allows you to test on almost every browser and operating system, but still, there are some limitations to the number of tests that can be executed in a single go. The primary goal of automation testing is to run as many tests as possible to achieve wide test coverage. At first, your web app might have short test builds, but as it grows, the test will iterate itself with each sprint. You can perform sequential automation testing with Selenium WebDriver, but it may not be as effective.

However, Selenium Grid can improve this iteration test problem by enabling parallel testing but it does not allow testing web apps across multiple OS and browser combinations. It only supports you to run tests on a single browser and operating system at a time. Using a cloud-based tool seems to be a solution to this problem by which a tester can test web apps across multiple browsers and operating systems at the same time. Although using a cloud tool shortens the time it takes to run automated tests but increases the number of configurations a tester can test on. Thus, Selenium is not used as a promising scalable solution.

Source: https://dripivplus.com/top-seven-most-popular-challenges-faced-in-selenium-test-automation/