What Is Selenium Grid? Why Selenium Grid Setup Is A Smart Call To Make?

Selenium Grid is a testing tool (which is a part of the Selenium Suite) that is based on the ‘client-server’ architecture. In Selenium Grid terminology, the Client machine is termed as ‘Hub’ and server(s) are termed as ‘Nodes’.

Selenium Grid setup allows you to execute cross browser testing through a variety of different machines across different browsers (as well as different versions of browsers) & different operating systems. Hence, it brings the required amount of ‘parallelism’ & ‘distribution’ to your test execution environment.

A Selenium Grid setup can have only one Hub and ‘n’ number of nodes. The primary job of the ‘hub machine’ is to distribute the test case supplied to the ‘node machine’ which matches the capabilities/requirements required for executing the test case for performing cross browser testing. We would discuss more Hub & Node (which are the core components for the setup of Selenium Grid infrastructure) in further sections.

There are two versions of Selenium Grid available, namely Selenium Grid 2.0 & Selenium Grid 1.0. Selenium Grid 2.0 is most popular amongst automation testers since it supports Selenium RC (Remote Control) and Selenium WebDriver scripts.

Why Selenium Grid Setup Is A Smart Call To Make?

There are a number of benefits of Selenium Grid setup. Here, we have a look at some of the top advantages of Selenium Grid setup as a part of your test execution strategy for performing cross browser testing.

• Reduced Execution Time: Selenium Grid setup can be used to execute multiple test cases on different browsers (and browser versions) and operating systems. You can also run multiple instances of Selenium RC along with the test configuring combinations. As the tests are executed in ‘parallel’ (scattered across different machines), the overall time consumed for cross browser testing trims down significantly.
• Scalable & Maintainable: As we know, Selenium Grid setup reduces the amount of time required for ‘parallel testing’ by a huge margin, the entire solution is highly scalable. If you want to perform testing on a ‘new node’ (which could be Operating System/Browser), all it needs are few minor tweaks in the code with respect to the addition of capabilities, and your solution for the new node is ready.
•  Perform Multi-Combination Testing: Using the Hub & Node feature of Selenium Grid setup, you can perform multi-OS, multi-browser, and multi-device verification of your source code.

By default, the execution after the setup of Selenium Grid is not parallel in nature. In order to take advantage of parallelism, the selenium tests should be written in a manner that takes ‘parallel execution’ for cross browser testing into account.

Article Resource: The original and detailed article is published here.