01. Selenium Interview Questions Part - 1

1.    What is Selenium?

Selenium is a suite of tools for browser automation. It is composed of "IDE", a recording and playback mechanism, "WebDriver" and "RC" which provide APIs for browser automation in a wide variety of languages, and "Grid", which allows many tests using the APIs to be run in parallel. It works with most browsers, including Firefox from 3.0 up to 7, Internet Explorer 8, Google Chrome, Safari and Opera 11.5

2.    What test can Selenium do?
Selenium could be used for the functional, regression, load testing of the web based applications. The automation tool could be implemented for post release validation with continuous integration tools like Jenkins, Hudson, QuickBuild or CruiseControl.

3.    What is the price of Selenium license per server?
Selenium is open source software, released under the Apache 2.0 license and can be downloaded and used without charge.

4.    How much does Selenium license cost per client machine?
Selenium is open source software, released under the Apache 2.0 license and can be downloaded and used without charge.

5.    Where to download Selenium?
Selenium can be downloaded and installed for free from seleniumhq.org

6.    What is the latest version of Selenium?
The latest versions are Selenium IDE 1.3.0, Selenium Server (formerly the Selenium RC Server) 2.8.0, Selenium Client Drivers Java 2.8.0, Selenium Client Drivers C# 2.8.0, Selenium Client Drivers Ruby 2.8.0, Selenium Client Drivers Python 2.8.1, Selenium Grid 1.0.8.

8.    What is Selenium IDE?
Selenium IDE is a Firefox add-on that records clicks, typing, and other actions to make a test cases, which QA Tester can play back in the Firefox browser or export to Selenium RC. Selenium IDE has the following features: record/play feature, debugging with step-by-step and breakpoints, page abstraction functionality, an extensibility capability allowing the use of add-ons or user extensions that expand the functionality of Selenium IDE
9.    What are the limitations of Selenium IDE?
Selenium IDE has many great features and is a fruitful and well-organized test automation tool for developing test cases, in the same time Selenium IDE is missing certain vital features of a testing tool: conditional statements, loops, logging functionality, exception handling, reporting functionality, database testing, re-execution of failed tests and screenshots taking capability. Selenium IDE doesn't for IE, Safari and Opera browsers.

10.    What does SIDE stand for?
Selenium IDE. It was a very tricky interview question.

11.    What is Selenium Remote Control (RC) tool?
Selenium Remote Control (RC) is the powerful solution for test cases that need more than simple browser actions and linear execution. Selenium-RC allows the developing of complex test scenarios like reading and writing files, querying a database, and emailing test reports. These tasks can be achieved by tweaking test cases in your preferred programming language.

13.    What is Selenium Grid?
Selenium Grid extends Selenium RC to distribute your tests across multiple servers, saving you time by running tests in parallel.

14.    What is Selenium WebDriver?
Selenium WebDriver is a tool for writing automated tests of websites. It is an API name and aims to mimic the behaviour of a real user, and as such interacts with the HTML of the application. Selenium WebDriver is the successor of Selenium Remote Control which has been officially deprecated.

15.    How many browsers are supported by Selenium IDE?
Test Engineer can record and playback test with Selenium IDE in Firefox.

16.    Can Selenium test an application on iPhone's Mobile Safari browser?
Selenium should be able to handle Mobile Safari browser. There is experimental Selenium IPhone Driver for running tests on Mobile Safari on the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.

17.    Can Selenium test an application on Android browser?
Selenium should be able to handle Android browser. There is experimental Selenium Android Driver for running tests in Android browser.

18.    What are the disadvantages of using Selenium as testing tool?
Selenium weak points are tricky setup; dreary errors diagnosis; tests only web applications

19.    How many browsers are supported by Selenium Remote Control?
QA Engineer can use Firefox 7, IE 8, Safari 5 and Opera 11.5 browsers to run actuall tests in Selenium RC.

20.    How many programming languages can you use in Selenium RC?
Several programming languages are supported by Selenium Remote Control - C# Java Perl PHP Python Ruby