What are the Features of Selenium IDE?

Selenium IDE (Integrated Development Environment) can be plugged into the Mozilla Firefox. It is a testing tool that is very simple to use, install, and user-friendly as well. It also provides easy learning and the creation of test scripts.

This works on the principle of record and playback and is good for all types of testing. So, let’s take a look at features of Selenium IDE and understand it in brief.

Features of Selenium IDE

Below are some of the features of Selenium IDE:

1. Automatically record test cases

Selenium IDE has the option to automatically record the test cases by understanding the interactions with a web application or website. For users who do not need that, there is a property to disable it as well.

Commands are being automated when a test script is recorded, and they are inserted depending upon the tests performed by the developer or tester.

2. In-built Assertion functionality

When test scripts are built via Selenium IDE, users get the option to verify and add asserts to test scripts. Using such commands, users can get to know the properties of web pages in an adept manner.

When the users find or click any element, then there is a text box that automatically pops up on the web page, showing a list of verifying and assert commands. This list expands from time to time as users continue to use Selenium IDE.

3. Comes with multiple actions

Selenium IDE runs on a set of commands popularly known as the “Selenese.” This is the type of command that helps tester or developer to define the things that IDE needs to take care of.

This is essential when users test websites in a virtual environment. It includes three major types of commands that are Assertions, Actions, and Assessors.

4. Responsive web bugs have nowhere to hide

Selenium IDE can help pinpoint the actual cause of frontend bugs. Every Selenium IDE script that is run with the Visual Grid can help to analyze with the Applitools Root Cause Analysis. It is no longer enough to find a bug – a developer who also needs to fix it.

When a visual bug is being found, it can be clicked on, and just the relevant Document Object Model (DOM) and Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) differences will come on the screen.

5. Third-party plugins support

You can install the plugins into your Selenium IDE to do some of the volume load testing cloud, uploading scripts to a cloud, or any of the production application monitoring service.

Lots of companies have integrated Selenium WebDriver into their offerings, and the same will happen with the Selenium IDE.

6. Selenium IDE runs from Continuous Integration build scripts

SIDE Runner is called from the cmd command; you can easily fit it into the CI build scripts, so long as the CI server can call selenium-ide-runner and upload the .side file as a build artifact. For example, you can input files in the CircleCI, Travis, and Jenkins.

This means Selenium IDE can be better integrated into the software development technology stack. Additionally, the scripts created by less technical QA team members that are business analysts, can run with every child. This helps better align QA with the developer, so fewer bugs escape into production.

7. Selenium IDE is now cross-browser

At the time when the record and playback tool first rolled out in the market in the year 2016, there were a lot of hitches to its wagon, as it remained the way for a decade. But now the Selenium IDE is also available for Google Chrome, IE Safari, and Firefox Add-on.

Selenium IDE takes the Selenium script, saved as a .side file, and runs it with the help of a browser driver such as Geckodriver, IE Driver, SafariDriver, ChromeDriver.

8. Visually test responsive web apps

At the time of testing the visual UI of the responsive web applications, it is better to do it on different screen sizes to make sure that nothing appears out of the whack.

When you use the visual UI testing for the Selenium IDE, you can test your web pages on the Visual Grid, which has more than 50 combinations of emulated devices, viewport sizes, and browsers as well.

Conclusion

We have now extensively discussed the Selenium IDE and its amazing features. Be it a record and play, its user-friendly testing environment, and some other basic functionality. IDE set-up is quick and easy. Just basic programming knowledge is must to run the scripts.

Its simple interface makes it the best tool in the Selenium suite. In the end, we can conclude that it is an ideal tool for automation testing and to eliminate manual errors from a program.