Talk:Selenium (software)

Selenium Components
The article is missing sections describing some of the newer components of selenium, mainly the Selenium WebDriver and Selenium Grid. Since this article refers to the Selenium framework as a whole and not just a specific component such as the Selenium IDE it would be beneficial to include information on all components. Barszcz-NJITWILL (talk) 23:15, 26 July 2011 (UTC)
 * It's also missing updated lists of supported languages. --Walter Görlitz (talk) 23:25, 26 July 2011 (UTC)
 * I recently reworked the article and added sections for Grid & WebDriver. Hope that closes this gap. Sebastian (talk) 15:24, 27 September 2011 (UTC)

Selenium History
A history section would be nice too since some of the components have since changed, and/or merged into different components, one of the creators Jason Huggins gives a good introduction to his though process and approach to creating Selenium in the book An Introduction to Testing Web Applications with twill and Selenium from the O'Reilly group.

Barszcz-NJITWILL (talk) 14:39, 29 July 2011 (UTC)


 * Some possibly useful additional sources:
 * Beginning Google Web Toolkit: From Novice to Professional
 * Programming HTML5 Applications
 * Beautiful Testing: Leading Professionals Reveal How They Improve Software
 * Next generation Java testing: TestNG and advanced concepts
 * -Miskaton (talk) 16:53, 28 December 2011 (UTC)


 * I added a paragraph to the History section which clarifies that "Selenium RC" was a separate project led by Google, and merged with another project called "WebDriver" developed by ThoughtWorks people, hence the name Selenium WebDriver. I think this is important because many get confused and don't understand that "WebDriver" is in fact a separate piece of software which was combined with "Selenium". This is alluded to in the description of Selenium RC and WebDriver below, but probably clearer when explicated in the history. Also added three external references which should help with the primary sources issue.


 * I moved the sentence about Selenium being open source to the intro - this is not really part of the history IMHO. Hope nobody objects to these edits :) Galit.lipovski (talk) 14:22, 29 June 2014 (UTC)

Selenese
Calling the Selenium commands a Domain Specific Language is a stretch - why not call it an |API? Rp (talk) 12:34, 17 September 2012 (UTC)

Marionette
..has no business to be mentioned on this page - should be moved to Test automation page IMHO. Even better if good gnomes created a page comparing test automation tools :-) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.37.171.204 (talk) 17:57, 6 September 2013 (UTC)

✅ I removed it as it's clearly not part of the Selenium project. Walter Görlitz (talk) 18:08, 6 September 2013 (UTC)

Selenium Ecosystem
I'd like to propose a new section on this page, about tools that integrate with and extend Selenium. There is some info on the official Selenium Ecosystem page, but most of the tools listed are not notable IMO according to Wikipedia's guidelines. So my idea is to have the following subsections:
 * Popular tools integrating with Selenium - e.g. Jenkins, Grails, Drupal, all of these have built-in integration or plugins that make it easy to work with Selenium.
 * Services running Selenium on the cloud - like BrowserStack etc. I'm thinking of doing a small table that explains what the different services provide - number of browsers/OS platforms provided, screenshots/video recording, secure tunnel (if you want to use these services behind a firewall), and support for mobile browsers.

Any feedback would be appreciated. In the meantime I'm working on a draft of the text. Galit.lipovski (talk) 16:39, 1 July 2014 (UTC)


 * Okay, I'm going ahead and posting my new section on Selenium Ecosystem. Galit.lipovski (talk) 21:51, 17 July 2014 (UTC)

Links to Companies in Ecosystem Section
Hi, before I ask my question I'd like to disclose that I a represent Sauce Labs, one of the companies discussed on this page. But my question applies equally to all the vendors that appear on the page and affects the quality of the article.

I noticed the new "Selenium Ecosystem" section that lists notable Selenium testing companies. However, of the four companies listed, three do not have a Wikipedia article about them - Sauce Labs, BrowserStack and TestingBot - and there is also no link to their official sites.

The typical convention on Wikipedia is that when a company's name is mentioned, there is a link from the company name to a place providing more info about the company. If there is a Wikipedia page of course the destination of that link should be that page. But if there isn't a page, should there not be a link to the company's official site?

According to External links, Official Links like these "are provided to give the reader the opportunity to see what the subject says about itself. These links are exempt from the links normally to be avoided."

It also says that "Official websites may be included in some infoboxes, and by convention are listed first in the External links section." But this refers to an official website which is the main subject of the page. Here the companies mentioned are ancillary, and it makes the most sense (IMO) to have the Official Links from the relevant section in which they appear.

Because of my conflict of interest I will of course refrain from editing the page myself. But I ask that the participating editors consider this matter and suggest a solution that will provide the opportunity to see "what the listed companies say about themselves" as per Wikipedia policy. Gilad.maayan (talk) 06:23, 19 August 2014 (UTC)


 * Yeah, you're right. Done.  RossPatterson (talk) 11:13, 19 August 2014 (UTC)
 * I removed them. This isn't about the subject (Selenium) but about secondary subjects. They were not in an External links section but rather in-line. Walter Görlitz (talk) 14:08, 19 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Nevertheless the companies are mentioned and there should be an opportunity for people to view their official sites. I think this is supported by Wikipedia policy. If inline links are not the right choice, there should be another way to link to these companies' sites. Gilad.maayan (talk) 16:02, 19 August 2014 (UTC)
 * I don't understand how Sauce Labs could be any more related to Selenium - the company exists solely to provide commercial service using Selenium, and it was founded by Jason Huggins. The criticism about the placement, however, is fair - I'd argue that tables like this are common throughout Wikipedia, and that they often have external links for items that lack articles, but WP:EL explicitly says "should not normally be placed in the body of an article", not "... except in tables".  I've moved the links to the External Links section of the article, where they belong. RossPatterson (talk) 22:01, 19 August 2014 (UTC)
 * No. That's what Google is for. I won't remove it, but it's against WP:SPAMLINK. Walter Görlitz (talk) 04:54, 20 August 2014 (UTC)

Definition
Selenium is not a framework. Look into framework definition. Software framework There is at least two "key distinguishing features" according which Selenium is not a framework: "inversion of control" and "extensibility". Selenium is "a suite of tools to automate web browsers across many platforms.". 89.22.4.3 (talk) 12:27, 29 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Sure it is. It can be built upon and it's not a single application? What would you call it? Walter Görlitz (talk) 06:44, 31 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Today, that is to say, in Selenium 2 (Selenium WebDriver), Selenium is
 * web testing automation software
 * accessed through a common API (the Selenium API)
 * with bindings freely available for multiple languages, such as Java, Python, C#, Perl
 * So from the perspective of the software tester, it is software you install, after which you can use it as a library.
 * It's more than a library: the library is just the language-specific binding that provides access to the core of the Selenium software, which actually interfaces with web browsers, directing them to do things and examining the results.
 * Your test code will make calls into the Selenium library using the Selenium object model.
 * Whether or not this makes it a framework, I don't know - framework is a pretty vague term to me.
 * I understand that Selenium 1 (which was a Firefox plugin based on injecting JavaScript into web pages) was quite different. This should be better explained in the article - e.g. Selenese seems to be a Selenium 1-specific term.Rp (talk) 21:17, 6 February 2017 (UTC)

Clarity in introduction
The introduction currently starts like this: Selenium is a portable software-testing framework for web applications. From reading that, I'm not sure if it's a specialized tool to test the browser-based client of a web application, or if it also tests the operation of the server, independently of a browser. From what I've read in the rest of the article, it sounds like the first one is more accurate, but I'm not sure. A little clarity would be helpful. —MiguelMunoz (talk) 22:56, 17 December 2018 (UTC)