You probably have heard of Selenium if you’re in the market of automation testing. It has been the choice of almost all the developers for over 10 years.
Selenium has various dedicated WebDriver versions like the Selenium ChromeDriver to execute the automated cross-browser testing instances on multiple browsers separately or simultaneously as per your requirements.
New to Selenium WebDriver? Don’t worry! We are here for you. Our blog will help you understand everything you need to know about Selenium ChromeDriver to improve the efficiency of your automation testing cycles.
Beginning from how to use Selenium ChromeDriver and going all the way to some of its best practices and common challenges, we will help you cover all the bases related to this tool.
Article Contents
What is Selenium ChromeDriver
Before we jump into all the details related to Selenium ChromeDriver, we must take a step back and start with a basic understanding.
Beginning with Selenium, it is one of the most widely used suites for automating your web app testing processes.
This suite will provide you with multiple tools that will assist you at different phases of the automation testing process.
The Selenium WebDriver is the most important component of the entire suite as it has the responsibility of not only initiating the testing process but also ensuring that the system executes it in the relevant element of the web application.
The Selenium WebDriver is often considered as the upgraded version of the Remote Controller that was previously present in the test suite.
One of the major advantages of this tool is that it will allow you to run the testing processes in the native environment of the browser without using any dedicated test engine.
The Selenium test suite also consists of other components like the Selenium Integrated Development Environment, the Selenium Grid, and the Selenium client API.
Selenium ChromeDriver specifically is a standalone server which will help you implement the WebDrivers Wire Protocol. This protocol is useful to enable Selenium to interact directly with the Chrome browser.
The entire approach helps ensure the efficiency and accuracy of the test execution process as a whole.
Setting Up Selenium ChromeDriver
To set up the Selenium ChromeDriver, you simply have to follow a series of steps.
However, before moving on to the steps, you also have to take care of certain prerequisites that will have a crucial role in helping to configure the overall test environment:
Prerequisites
Set up Python or your chosen programming language that you want to use to create the automation test scripts.
In this case, the major advantage of Selenium will be its support of multiple programming languages.
This support will help you to eliminate the learning curve of learning a specific language for this tool.
- You also have to download and install the latest version of Google Chrome on your testing system so that you can run the automation test scripts.
- It is also important to download the Selenium ChromeDriver for initiating the testing process. During this process, you must ensure that the Selenium ChromeDriver version is relevant to the installed version of Google Chrome to avoid any compatibility issues.
- Finally, you must incorporate the Selenium WebDriver library so that you can utilize various third party integrations and plugins to further improve the quality of your overall testing process.
- Now that we have finished configuring the prerequisites for the testing process, we can move on towards the steps that can help you set up Selenium ChromeDriver for executing automation testing on Google Chrome:
Installing Selenium
The first step is to install the Selenium test suite on your system if you haven’t completed this step already.
You can use the pip package installer to install Selenium. To complete this process, you simply have to enter the following code snippet in the terminal window:
pip install Selenium
Downloading ChromeDriver
Finished installing Selenium? Proceed to download Selenium ChromeDriver by following the steps that we have mentioned below:
- Begin the process by checking your Google Chrome version. You can easily perform this step by navigating to the path: “chrome://settings/help”.
- Now that you have located the specific Chrome version, you need to go to ChromeDriver download page and download the version that corresponds to this version.
- The final step in this process is to extract the downloaded file and place it in a directory of your choice. After placing the file, you also have to ensure that you’re adding this part to the system directory so that it is accessible by the root folder.
Verifying the Installation
After completing the installation process, one of the safest practices is to verify the installation so that you do not stumble upon any obstacles during the actual test execution process. To verify that ChromeDriver is properly installed and set up on your system, you need to enter the following code snippet into the terminal window:
After executing the above code, you will have to wait for the system to perform the executed code. If Google opens and the title is printed, you can verify that the setup process has been successfully completed.
Writing The Automation Scripts With ChromeDriver
Now that you have finished the installation and the verification process, you can move on to creating your first automation test script using the Selenium ChromeDriver. To help you understand this process, we have attached a sample code snippet for the same:
The above code snippet is aimed at locating specific elements on a web application and helping you perform the login process on a sample website.
Let us take a quick look at some of the major components of the above test script to clarify our understanding about the entire process:
- The WebDriver initialization process will be responsible for starting the ChromeDriver instance so that it can begin with the test execution phase.
- The element location methods like “find_element” will help you locate fields by their respective name and ID.
- Finally, you can use the action simulation segment of the code snippet to input various user actions like writing text or clicking buttons. The major role of this step is to simulate various forms of user behavior and understand how the application reacts accordingly.
Best Practices for Selenium ChromeDriver Automation
Now that we have finished understanding about all the setup and test execution phases, let us divert our attention towards some of the best practices that we suggest the testers to incorporate in this phase.
These practices are aimed at not only improving the productivity of the process but also to have a subtle role in improving the quality of the application that is being developed:
- We suggest that the best approach is to incorporate data-driven testing to separate the data from scripts. You can achieve this goal by reading input from CSV or Excel files, which will act as third-party data inputs.
- It is very important to incorporate real device testing with Selenium ChromeDriver to improve the testing accuracy. You can perform this process by incorporating cloud testing with platforms like LambdaTest. It is an AI-powered test orchestration and execution platform that lets you perform manual and automation testing at scale with over 3000 real devices, browsers, and OS combinations. It also includes legacy browsers like Safari for Windows for even better test coverage.
- The testers should also avoid hard-coded waits as these wait methods often fail to test the proper functioning of dynamic elements present in modern apps. Instead, you should consider using dynamic waits like Explicit Waits, which is natively present within the Selenium test suite and will also help ensure the scripts don’t fail due to varying load times.
- Instead of creating a long and complex test suite for multiple elements, we suggest the testers to modernize the tests by breaking the scripts into smaller and reusable functions. This practice not only helps improve the readability of the overall testing infrastructure but also boosts its maintainability.
- It is important to use logging and reporting to track the test progress and capture screenshots of failure. These pieces of data would be massively useful when you will be performing the debugging processes. This is because they will help you to quickly find the faulty elements and perform the required resolution steps on them. The following code snippet will help you implement test logging with Selenium ChromeDriver:
- Finally, we suggest the testers to keep track of all the ChromeDriver testing scenarios by maintaining adequate documentation. This documentation will also act as a guideline for the non-technical members of the team and other business stakeholders. It will also be useful to roll out the subsequent updates to the app infrastructure without hampering its code functioning or impacting the user experience.
Troubleshooting Common Issues
Like any other part of the application development and testing cycle, you will face challenges while executing the automation testing processes with the Selenium ChromeDriver.
However, with the proper knowledge and adequate planning, you can easily troubleshoot these issues and avoid huge failures:
- The most common error is the ChromeDriver version mismatch, which will halt the entire test execution process. To avoid this issue, you must thoroughly ensure the ChromeDriver version matches your Chrome browser.
- You will also encounter certain scenarios when the system will throw an exception of “element not found”. This mainly occurs when you are using the traditional wait mechanisms for verifying the performance of dynamic elements. So, you can resolve this by using waits and retry mechanisms, which can handle dynamic elements.
- Finally, you can encounter an error of “SessionNotCreatedException.” This error mainly occurs when knowingly or unknowingly you update either Google Chrome or the Selenium ChromeDriver. So, the easiest way of tackling this exception is to check for updates on both the browser and the ChromeDriver at the same time to ensure that they’re compatible and on the latest version.
The Bottom Line
Based on all the factors that we have looked in this article, we can safely say that Selenium ChromeDriver will provide a robust solution to automate the web app testing process.
Moreover, by following all the best practices that we have outlined above, you can use advanced techniques to create efficient, stable, and scalable automation test scripts.
So, whether you are a beginner or an experienced tester, it is one of the most important practices to master Selenium ChromeDriver automation as it will help you unlock various new possibilities for modern quality assurance and continuous delivery.
Factors like these will have a direct impact on scaling your market reach while having a significant boost over your overall brand reputation.
