Getting Started with the Selenium WebDriver Framework

Learn how to run tests with Selenium using WebDriver and Grid components.

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To get started with Selenium, we’ll need to set up the grid for the specific browser drivers on which we would like to run our tests (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Edge).

Main components of Selenium

The Selenium framework consists of three main components:

  • Selenium WebDriver: This is a collection of several language bindings to drive different browsers for testing purposes, as well as the individual browsers controlling code.

  • Selenium Grid: This is a Selenium framework component that is designed to distribute and scale test automation by running tests in parallel across different combinations of browsers/OS versions.

  • Selenium IDE: This is a quick ramp-up solution that helps generate the first basic Selenium scripts through a browser plugin via recording, with no lines of code needing to be written.

Here, we’ll only cover Selenium WebDriver and Selenium Grid.

Note: Selenium IDE is a basic entry-level browser plugin that allows beginners to record their first Selenium script without writing a single line of code. Once the script is recorded, they can copy the code to their IDE and continue building on top of it using code.

Selenium WebDriver

Selenium WebDriver is a recommended W3C testing technology that is intended to drive native browsers effectively and in adherence to the W3C standards. This conformance ensures that all scripts across different browsers are written in the same way and are simple to use.

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