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Computers can be fascinating to work with. There is so much involved in creating the systems, the software, and hardware. One option a person has for a software testing job is using the Selenium testing tool. The Selenium testing tool is a software testing framework specifically for web applications. There are other tools available for testing video games, computer software applications like operating systems, and even business software.

The Selenium testing tool offers a record and playback option that other software options do not have for testing. You can learn about the authoring of the testing as well as testing scripting language with the Selenium testing tool. Selenium is considered a DSL or domain specific language program where it looks at the primary scripting languages. These include Java, Ruby, Python, PHP, Perl, and Groovy. Selenium can also be used on Linux, Mac, and Windows operating systems.

Jason Huggins created the Selenium testing tool as an open source software application. This means it is freeware, but it is also under the Apache 2.0 license. The latest software from the Selenium project is Selenium Grid. It can run numerous tests concurrently from local or remote systems. This helps keep the testing time to a minimum. It is one of the reasons the Selenium testing tool is so popular.

Features of the tool include intelligent field selection. It will use IDs, XPath or names when needed. It has auto complete, walk through tests, debug and format options. You can save tests in HTML, Ruby, or other formats. It also has user extension JS files support.

The Selenium testing tool is not without its own issues. Firefox is one browser that struggles with the testing software. It has been known to give back unreliable results. Not all browsers have issues, such as IE. Another common problem with the Selenium testing tool is timeouts. Programmers may find their tests interrupted due mostly to site delays, network delays, or changes being made to the site from another source. Some of the issues will take longer than manual testing, so one is cautioned in the use of Selenium unless they know it will work for the browser they are testing websites in.