There has been a significant increase in the range of mobile devices and browsers in the recent past. So the headache is now wholly on the developers as they have to make content that runs smoothly across all kinds of devices. Testing the applications ensures that the devices are running smoothly in all environments. Few years down the lane, the testing was usually done by the manual testers, who were prominent in doing so, but the challenge was the time consumption. It used to take months together to complete the testing, but now with the advent of various tools, it has become less than a couple of weeks. Testing has become much easier and faster than ever before because of new approaches, agile workflows, and online Selenium Course. Selenium has been one of the most popular solutions for web app testing in today’s fast-paced development industry due to its numerous features. But everything has boon and bane. In this article, we shall discuss what are the challenges faced in selenium automation testing.
Top 9 Challenges Faced In Selenium Automation
- Cross-browser testing: Our web application may not always respond the same way in different browsers, and our website may work correctly in Chrome but not in Firefox. Because there are so many browsers on the market today, executing test automation on all of them may be impossible. However, we must still verify that the application under test is fully compatible with the most popular browsers, including Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, and Internet Explorer. Testing on generally used browsers is currently insufficient, and we may need to test on commonly used browser versions and other operating systems and resolutions. This makes test automation challenging to users.
- Identifying Dynamic Elements: Many web apps or websites have dynamic web elements that are not displayed when you visit the site for the first time. This means that the web pages are user-specific and display various data for different users depending on their needs; new data arrives on the web page after a set length of time or when a user clicks something on the page.
Dynamic XPath or dynamic CSS selectors can be used to handle dynamic elements. To manage dynamic objects, you can also use functions like contains, ends with, starts-with, and so forth.
- Capacity to scale: The ability to scale is one of the most difficult components of test automation. Running tests on many browsers, operating systems, and standards, as previously indicated, seem to be critical. Although Selenium WebDriver allows you to run tests in chronological order, there is no better way to conduct cross-browser testing. Over time, software under testing might grow numerous components, resulting in significantly more tests, and executing diverse data sets at the same time can become a stressful task. Testing data simultaneously is complex with Selenium.
- Synchronizing Events: One of the primary causes of our automation script’s failure is synchronization troubles. When we expect an event to occur, sync difficulties may arise. However, it may be delayed or not due to some unknown reason, causing our test case to fail. For example, when we run an automation script, we expect a “accept/decline cookies” prompt to appear shortly after starting the page, but for some reason, it was delayed or did not appear at all. This form of synchronization is the source of our test script’s failure. To handle this, we typically employ Selenium waits such as Implicit wait and Explicit wait.
- Handling OTP And Captcha: The use of Captchas is another hurdle in Selenium automation testing. As we all know, captcha and OTP cannot be deduced or expected because their values change every time they are generated. Bank transfers, account opening confirmation, and many more services that entail Captcha and OTP generation are tough for automated test testers to automate.
It can also be interpreted as an indication that the program is not fully functional and that manual testing is not entirely avoidable. Creating a new OTP and Captcha each time is a time-consuming procedure that remains one of the most significant obstacles faced during Selenium automation.
- False Positive and False Negative Results: False Positive and False Negative findings have long been an automation tester’s worst nightmare. False Positive refers to the situation in which we find errors in our test cases although the program under test functions properly. On the other hand, false-negative results refer to the situation in which we get passing results for our test cases, but the program under test contains defects. Such ambiguity misleads the testing team and widens the communication gap between the QA and development teams. Handling flaky tests is a complex problem for automation testers.
- Pop-ups and alert handling: While working with a web application, the following types of popups and alerts may appear:
- Browser level notification: Examples include “Allow/Decline camera access,” “Allow/Decline microphone access,” and so on. These are browser-level notifications that are handled differently by different browsers.
- ChromeOptions can be used with the Chrome browser. Similarly, for the Firefox browser, use FirefoxOptions/FirefoxProfile.
- Web-based alerts: Examples of such messages include: “This site says…”, “Do you want to leave this site?” and so on. These are the alerts that can be handled by the Selenium predefined class “Alerts,” which has several methods.
- Reporting Restrictions: Without a doubt, Selenium can vastly improve automated testing capabilities; but, due to various constraints, it is unable to create effective testing reports. After performing test cases, every tester requires a good testing report to help assess the full test scenario and detect bugs.
- Only web-based applications are supported: Selenium only allows automated testing for web-based applications; hence it cannot be used to test Windows-based programs. It’s also worth noting that Selenium can’t automate everything. There are still some duties that must be completed manually. As a result, an understanding of programming languages is required for using Selenium.
Conclusion: Without question, automation has significantly assisted developers, and in the web app development sector, it has been a lifesaver, saving time and reducing errors in the deployment process. Selenium, like any other framework, has limits. It is one of the most popular and extensively used frameworks for automating responsive design testing, but it cannot be used to test local window-based apps.
Some of the constraints encountered in Selenium Automated Testing were mentioned above, and we attempted to provide ways to overcome the drawbacks. Hopefully, it will assist you in coping.
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