10 benefits Selenium Test Automation brings for the Publishing industry

As the eBook market flourishes over the years, there is a massive amount of data in store for retailers and publishers. There was a time when the publishing sector was not powered with such data, but digitization of the overall reading experience and marketing has killed all the inherent limitations of the sector. Last year, a total of 162 million units of eBooks were sold in the U.S. alone, contributing massively to the global eBook publishing revenue of 12.32 billion. 

Likewise, a recent report states that the global publishing industry has experienced positive growth over the last five years and is expected to grow further at a CAGR of 10.4%. Amongst some other benefits, internet publishing, foreign investment, and easing of regulatory restrictions are bound to give a boost to the publishing industry in the near future. 

E-books and E-reading devices are creating the right buzz and giving a makeover to the publishing industry. In this scenario, revamping and automating the digital platform is highly critical. For publishing houses, the website is the first page of the book that readers will judge and rest their decisions on. 

How do you ensure that your website is giving those consistent results and offering an engaging experience to the rampant footfalls on the site? Testing is the key and Test Automation is the way to ensure your website’s expected performance and functionality. 

With Web Application Testing it is imperative to address issues of the website’s functionality, security issues, user interface, compatibility, and performance. Test Automation provides a robust framework to run tests across browsers with no particular alterations. Importantly, it mechanically drives the same tests with a combination of various forms of data to enhance test coverage. 

Some key benefits of Test Automation are: 

• Manual intervention is less, so the possibility of errors diminishes. 

• It ensures higher ROI on the huge investments required initially. 
• Automated tests make the process more reliable and the tests more dependable. 
• Automation helps you find bugs at an early stage. 
• You can test 24*7 from a remotely–held device as well. 
• It makes the test scripts reusable – need new scripts every time even with changes in the version of the OS on the device and the tests can recur without any errors. 

• Most importantly, it enables testing in volumes. For instance, it allows you to run tests on thousands of mobile devices. Now, this is impossible with Manual Testing. 

Selenium is the most popularly used freeware and open source automation tool. The benefits of Selenium for Test Automation are immense. Importantly, it enables record and playback for testing web applications and can run multiple scripts across various browsers. The benefits of Selenium Test Automation hold relevance across diverse business segments. 

      1.Open-Source: 

As mentioned earlier, the biggest strength of Selenium is that it is a freeware and a portable tool. It has no upfront direct costs involved. The tool can be freely downloaded and the community-based support for it is freely available. 

     2.Language support: 

Selenium supports a range of languages, including Java, Perl, Python, C#, Ruby, Groovy, JavaScript, and more. It has its own script, but it is not limited by that language. It can work with various languages – whatever the developers/testers are comfortable with. 

     3. Supports Operating Systems: 

Selenium can operate and support across multiple Operating Systems (OS) like Windows, Mac, Linux, and UNIX. With Selenium suite of solutions, a tailored testing suite can be created over any platform and then executed on another one. For instance, you can create test cases using Windows OS and run it with ease on a Linux–based system. 

      4.Support across browsers: 

Selenium provides support across multiple browsers, namely, Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Safari. This becomes highly resourceful while executing tests and testing it across various browsers simultaneously. 

      5.Support for programming languages and framework 

Selenium integrates with programming languages and various frameworks. For instance, it can integrate with ANT or Maven type of framework for source code compilation. Further, it can integrate with the TestNG framework for testing applications and reporting purposes. It can integrate with Jenkins or Hudson for Continuous Integration (CI) and can even integrate with other open-source tools to support other features. 

      6.Tests across devices 

Selenium Test Automation can be implemented for mobile web application automation on Android, iPhone, and Blackberry. This can help in generating necessary results and address issues on a continuous basis. 

      7.Constant updates 

Selenium support is community–based, which enable constant updates and upgrades. These upgrades are readily available and do not require specific training. This makes Selenium resourceful and cost-effective as well. 

      8.Loaded Selenium suites 

Selenium is not just a singular tool or utility, it a loaded package of various testing tools and so, is referred to as a Suite. Each tool is designed to cater to different testing needs and requirements of test environments. 

Additionally, Selenium comes with capabilities to support Selenium IDE, Selenium Grid, and Selenium Remote Control (RC). 

      9.Ease of implementation 

Selenium offers a user-friendly interface that helps create and execute tests easily and effectively. Its open-source features help users to script their own extensions that make them easy to develop, customized actions and even manipulate at an advanced level. 

Tests run directly across browsers and the users can watch while the tests are being executed. Additionally, Selenium’s reporting capabilities are one of the reasons for choosing it, as it allows testers to extract the results and take follow-up actions. 

      10.Reusability and Add-ons 

Selenium Test Automation framework uses scripts that can be tested directly across multiple browsers. Concurrently, it is possible to execute multiple tests with Selenium, as it covers almost all aspects of functional testing by implementing add-on tools that broaden the scope of testing.  

There is another school of thought that talks about some gaps in Selenium Automation Testing. For instance, Test Automation experts also say that Selenium is not an all-inclusive tool for automating the testing of web applications, as it needs third-party frameworks and language support to get absolutely functional and show the needed results. 

How a publishing house benefitted from our Selenium Test Automation solutions 

Our team of experts at Cigniti collaborated with a Philadelphia-based leading academic research paper publishing house to offer Test Automation services by leveraging Selenium. The client was observing the growing popularity of its research publications and its niche readership accessing the website had shot up. 

The publishing house needed support with its website that required testing across browsers and Operating Systems (OS). The key challenge was to address the layout issues across different OS-device-browser combination. This was a challenge as the majority of the pages were syntactically incorrect. Additionally, our team had to deal with functionality issues and JavaScript compatibility as well. 

By leveraging Selenium Testing, we developed a utility using BrowserStack and executed multiple scripts simultaneously across browsers/OS combinations to address the functionality issues. Finally, we achieved 100% test coverage for cross-browser compatibility. A BrowserStack utility developed by us executed all test scripts across different browsers and OS combinations and identified bugs/defects much faster. 

The publishing industry is highly–fragmented and statistics show that North America is dominating the game. Additionally, a combination of factors such as literacy level, income level, changing lifestyle, advertiser spending, technological changes, and government regulations are seen to impact industry dynamics significantly. 

Cigniti’s Test Automation CoE takes precedence in leveraging Selenium as a tool of choice for automating web application testing, performing functional regression automation, and developing automated tests. We have worked with innovative businesses and global leaders and offered phenomenal testing strategies and solutions. Connect with Cigniti to leverage our unified test automation framework to overcome key challenges in Selenium test automation and get your Website/Web Apps functionally ready for your niche audience.