7 Most Common Challenges in Automation Using Selenium

Selenium is one of the best tools to automate your testing process, but like every good stuff, Selenium also comes with some drawbacks. Without any doubt, Selenium makes it easier for users to test web applications and websites, but there are quite a few challenges that developers and software testers face while using it. In this post, we are going to talk about some of these common challenges faced by testing teams during Selenium Automation Testing.

A large portion of the selenium challenges encountered while automation testing using Selenium can have some straight forward solutions, which we would be discussing as the top challenges and how to solve them.

Challenge No. 1 -> Identifying Dynamic Elements

It can be troublesome to identify content with dynamically generated attributes using Selenium. Dynamic content is based on dynamic identifiers. These IDs are renewed every time an element is displayed, which makes it difficult to address the web element based on this attribute. In which case, you cannot use the ID locator to identify the element.

Solution:

The dynamic elements can be handled with dynamic XPath or dynamic CSS selectors. You can also use functions, such as contains, ends with, starts-with, etc. to handle dynamic objects. In case, you need to determine a particular issue while distinguishing web components, you can add a protocol to this set. When added to the protocol set, you can make your content free or code-based test situations and run them on your WebDriver endpoints.

Challenge No. 2 -> Executing data-driven testing

Executing data-driven testing is the technical challenges with Selenium WebDriver that it doesn’t have a built-in data-driven testing system. This implies you need to manually associate your mechanized tests to external data sources, read the information out of these sources and execute your test situation with the additional data in a case you need to execute the data-driven testing procedures.

Solution:

With no extra arrangements, you can pick between a few sorts of information connectors, for example, basic information table, CSV document, SQL database and Excel record. Essentially utilize the information from these outer sources to consequently execute your test cases with various data sets.

Challenge No. 3 -> Cross Browser Testing

Selenium is widely used for automated cross-browser testing of web apps because it supports multiple languages and operating systems. While automating cross-browser testing with Selenium, many automation testers found that some elements of the web app work with one browser and not with others. It is necessary to make sure that your web app works well and appropriately in every browser; otherwise, you can lose out on a high traffic rate.

Solution:

To avoid this issue, you should run the script again and again on different browsers and analyze the results. If it fails on some browsers, then you will have to change the locator strategy. 

Challenge No. 4 -> Dealing with timeout issues

Whether you call it a timeout or sync issue, it is one of the most common challenges in Selenium test automation. If you don’t handle this issue carefully, most of your testing script might fail. It is even proved many times that around 80% of scripts fail due to improper sync while executing automation testing.

Solution:

Though this problem can be avoided using smart waits like Implicit waits, Fluent waits, and explicit waits that are available within Selenium. You can write your custom method to handle the sync issues. For example, if you use explicit waits, you can make the Selenium WebDriver freeze the execution and wait until certain conditions are met. This is just one example; you can accomplish the explicit wait in multiple ways.

Challenge No. 5 -> Maintaining web elements

Test maintenance is unfortunate and unavoidable. Especially in complex testing scenarios, it can be difficult to maintain web elements addressed in your automated tests.

Solution:

When using a pure Selenium WebDriver implementation to automate your test scenarios, the same web element may be used multiple times. If any of these repetitive element changes, you then have to alter every occurrence of it manually. Even if you have used the page object pattern to manage web elements, you have to find the element that has changed and fix it in code.

Challenge No. 6 -> Flakiness

Often it happens that Selenium gives you flaky tests, which means test results come back as positive or negative when they are the opposite. Eventually, too many flaky tests may mean testers might ignore the results, though this isn’t a great option either.

Solution:

Usually unstable builds could be a reason for this Flakiness, and these unstable builds can be a product of one of many factors: poor test isolation, flaky external services, and timeouts. By examining the elements of your Selenium tests, it’ll be easier to find out why your builds are unstable so you can approach the problem head-on.

Challenge No. 7 -> Limited Reporting

While Selenium will exponentially increase your automated testing capabilities because it’s an open-source tool it is limited and features and does not support much reporting on its own. No doubt Selenium can enormously improve automated testing capabilities, but due to some limitations, it cannot generate good testing reports.

Solution:

Every automation tester needs a good testing report after executing test cases, as it helps analyze the entire test scenario and find bugs in it. You can set up a framework to generate an output folder after a test with report information like errors, execution time, pass/fail count, etc. like TestNG.

Conclusion

When we talk about automation testing, Selenium always finds its way to the conversation. Selenium is not perfect but it’s just good enough for testers to put forth a greater effort and ignore the codeless trend. Even with these challenges there is are ways to resolve them get the maximum benefit from Selenium. If you know of any other challenges that become an obstacle in Selenium automation testing, then do let us know about it in the comment section.

Please subscribe to my Youtube Channel & follow me on Twitter to learn more. Try my Software Testing course for FREE and enjoy 2 months of Free Unlimited access to Skillshare.

Prashant Kumar