Selenium Automation Testing with C#

Automation Testing:
Due to the increasing demand for effective software products, each software development team must conduct several tests before to releasing the finished product onto the market. Before a software product is launched, test engineers work hard to find any flaws or bugs, yet deployed software is always flawed. Even with the best manual testing procedures, there is always a chance that the finished software product will have a flaw or won’t be able to satisfy the needs of the end user. The best approach to improve the efficacy, efficiency, and coverage of your software testing is through automation testing.
Automation testing employs specialised tools to automate the execution of manually designed test cases without the involvement of humans. Automation testing tools can access test data, control test execution, and compare actual results to expected results. As a result, detailed test reports of the system under test are generated.
Automation testing on an application includes both functional and performance tests.

Selenium:
Selenium is a vital automation testing tool because it supports a wide range of programming languages, including Java, Python, C#, Ruby, Perl, and PHP and to automate test scripts in a variety of browsers, including Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, and Opera, on a variety of operating systems, including Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Selenium is a popular open-source Web UI (User Interface) automation testing suite.
Selenium can be used to automate functional tests and is compatible with automation testing tools like Maven, Jenkins, and Docker to achieve continuous testing. It can also be used in conjunction with tools like TestNG and JUnit to manage test cases and generate reports.

Selenium Tool Suite:
Selenium is a software suite, that supports automation testing in various ways and is not a single tool. It is made up of four major components, which are as follows:
• Selenium Integrated Development Environment (Selenium IDE)
• Selenium Remote Control (Selenium RC)
• WebDriver
• Selenium Grid

Selenium IDE:
Selenium IDE is a Firefox extension that allows test scripts to be recorded and played back. Testers can export recorded scripts in a variety of languages, including HTML, Java, Ruby, RSpec, Python, C#, JUnit, and TestNG. These exported scripts can be used in Selenium RC or Web driver.
The scope of the Selenium IDE is limited, and the generated test scripts are not very robust or portable.

Selenium RC:
The Selenium RC (officially deprecated by selenium) framework enables testers to create automated web application UI tests in any of the supported programming languages. It also includes an HTTP proxy server, which convinces the browser that the web application being tested is from the domain specified by the proxy server.
Selenium RC is comprised of two parts.
• RC Server for Selenium (acts as a HTTP proxy for web requests)
• Client for Selenium RC (library containing your programming language code)
Selenium RC was very effective for testing complex AJAX-based web user interfaces as part of a Continuous Integration System.

Web Driver:
The successor to Selenium RC, Selenium Web Driver (Selenium 2), is by far the most important component of the Selenium Suite. Selenium Web Driver offers a programming interface for creating and running test cases. Test scripts are written to identify web elements on web pages and then perform desired actions on those elements.
Selenium Web Driver is much faster than Selenium RC because it makes direct calls to web browsers. To interact with the web browser, RC requires the use of an RC server. Since WebDriver calls the methods of different browsers directly, we have a separate driver for each browser. Some of the most popular web drivers are:
• Mozilla Firefox Driver (Gecko Driver)
• Google Chrome Driver
• Internet Explorer Driver
• Opera Driver

Selenium Grid:
Selenium Grid is another important component of Selenium Suite that allows us to run our tests on multiple machines against multiple browsers at the same time. In other words, we can run our tests on multiple machines running different browsers and operating systems at the same time.
To achieve parallel execution of test scripts, Selenium Grid employs the Hub-Node Architecture. The Hub is the network’s master, while the nodes are its slaves. The Hub manages the execution of test scripts on various network nodes.

C# programming language:
C# is an object-oriented programming language that is pronounced C-sharp and runs on the.Net framework.
The CLR, or Common Language Runtime, is built to run the C# programming language.
C# is also known as a structured programming language since it allows us to segment programmes using functions.

The benefits of C# for automation testing are
• C# is useful for automation testing because it allows the automation test engineer to create an application on the.Net framework using Visual Studio. As C# IDE is Visual Studio, it provides a faster development and debugging experience than Java’s Eclipse.
• C# is a programming language that supports Selenium binding, this language binding will also be updated in combination with the Java code.
• C# has many built-in functions that speed up development.