What are the Good, Bad, and Ugly of the Selenium IDE?
Selenium IDE is referred to as an add-on for the Firefox that lets anyone to build macros via commands and then translating them into reproducible steps with Selenium Firefox Driver. Commands entail clicking on an element, typing in a field, and dragging an element from one location to other location. This add on can be easily downloaded from the Mozilla app store.
Good of Selenium IDE
- Selenium IDE is easily installable and has a fast setup.
- It has a simple interface. Selenium IDE does not need any CS degree or expertise knowledge of programming language to set up most of the test. As a matter of fact, it is just point and click. There is a huge list of possible asserts to seek when it comes to the debugging processes, and it also highlights in red if the test fails.
- It has a quick turnaround time. When it is compared to writing tests in order to enhance the power of Selenium, Selenium IDE has proven itself to be incredibly fast.
Bad of Selenium IDE
- It only runs in Firefox. Around 25 percent of the traffic comes from Firefox and 70 percent comes from chrome.
- Working on the Canvas is just tough. With our very own Selenium solution, we use the Actions object to work on the canvas.
- Doesn’t follow a standard. Selenium IDE is deemed the open source project. The commands and syntaxes vary quite much. Some will need specific fields, and a target. It may be versatile, but the lack of standard means that tester will need to spend a lot of time learning the know-how which is time and effort consuming.
The Ugly of Selenium IDE
- The waiting game is quite high in Selenium and worse in Selenium IDE. You will need to wait until the button is completely set up. To solve this, Selenium IDE options use a loop and build some retry code to tell it to wait a bit more.
- Selenium gives direct access to API which creates users, adds users to teams, creates documents and cleans up the rest. With IDE there is no access, so the test environment never cleans up.
- To be honest, simple tests tend to flake out around 5 percent of the time. Once it is ramped up and complex testing takes place, you will get false positives 20 to 25 percent of the time. You have to spend hours to fine tune the waiting periods, change the test speed and click on clear components. The most you can get is 10 percent fail rate.
