What is selenium?

Selenium is an open-source tool that is used for test automation. It is licensed under Apache License 2.0. Selenium is a suite of tools that helps in automating only web applications.

This tutorial will give you an in-depth understanding of Selenium and its related tools and their usage.

This tutorial is designed for software testing professionals who would like to learn the basics of Selenium through practical examples. The tutorial contains enough ingredients to get you started with Selenium from where you can take yourself to higher levels of expertise.

Before proceeding with this tutorial, you should have a basic understanding of Java or any other object-oriented programming language. In addition, you should be well-versed with the fundamentals of testing concepts.

Selenium is an open-source and a portable automated software testing tool for testing web applications. It has capabilities to operate across different browsers and operating systems. Selenium is not just a single tool but a set of tools that helps testers to automate web-based applications more efficiently.

Let us now understand each one of the tools available in the Selenium suite and their usage.

Tool	Description
Selenium IDE	Selenium Integrated Development Environment (IDE) is a Firefox plugin that lets testers to record their actions as they follow the workflow that they need to test.
Selenium RC	Selenium Remote Control (RC) was the flagship testing framework that allowed more than simple browser actions and linear execution. It makes use of the full power of programming languages such as Java, C#, PHP, Python, Ruby and PERL to create more complex tests.
Selenium WebDriver	Selenium WebDriver is the successor to Selenium RC which sends commands directly to the browser and retrieves results.
Selenium Grid	Selenium Grid is a tool used to run parallel tests across different machines and different browsers simultaneously which results in minimized execution time.