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Why Selenium for GUI Test Automation

You are working in an organization which has now a stable set of manual test cases that is used for regression every time your product releases and you are also aware that this set will keep on increasing release by release. Soon you are seeing that the regression test cycle is weighing down on your product release timelines. In these days of AGILE practices, the obvious next place you look is to automate your test cases such that the regression cycle is shortened. This is not the only benefit of automation, but we will leave that discussion to some other time. Also the purpose of this discussion is to concentrate on GUI automation tool (SELENIUM). So if you are responsible for GUI automation, the very first question that will come up is:-

What is the best GUI test automation tool for my application?

There are several automation tool in the market, some are free and some are licensed. But here we are discussing on Selenium so we are not talking about other automation tool. 
Selenium should be considered because it does not require any huge upfront investment, also significant investment is required in learning a new suite of tools, a team dedicated to specific skill set is not required. Also it is an open source software tool which is free of cost. To keep this discussion in perspective, I would like to discuss merits/demerits of Selenium being the tool of choice.


Merits of Selenium

• Choice of using language of your choice.
• Script once, Run on multiple browsers
• Inherent applicability to AJAX
• A community supported Selenium Software suite
• Support multiple test frameworks
• Integration with the ecosystem

Demerits of Selenium

• Supporting non-web applications 
• Maintenance readiness is not inbuilt

We can discuss more on these topics in next section.