What Are the Limitations of Selenium? How to fix it?

Last updated on May 19th, 2023 at 07:37 pm

Selenium is a popular tool, but it has certain restrictions that you should be aware of. This blog discusses the core limitations of selenium and also specifying how to fix those. 

What Are Selenium’s Limitations?

Here’s a short rundown of Limitations of Selenium

Selenium demands your team’s knowledge — as well as resources to manage.

• Selenium is a framework that requires a lot of upkeep and is difficult to expand as your business grows.
• A cloud-based lab is more secure than the Selenium Grid.
• Selenium does not provide test visibility through reporting.

1. Resources and Expertise: Operating Selenium and its dependent frameworks, such as WebDriverIO, Protractor, and others, necessitates a substantial amount of knowledge, expertise, and technical competence. The development and testing teams must work together. To use the Selenium framework to its best potential, you must be familiar with its architecture. Some teams are having trouble finding the right resources to manage Selenium testing.

2. Scalability and maintenance: Test maintenance might be difficult for test automation engineers when using Selenium. Minor UI changes might cause tests to fail. Maintaining tests with the Selenium framework, on the other hand, takes years of expertise debugging and maintaining such scripts. Selenium allows you to test on almost any browser and operating system. However, the amount of testing time and volume permitted is limited by the number of hub/nodes accessible.
3. Limited lab space: Selenium provides the “Selenium Grid” as a testing lab. The Selenium Grid allows you to run numerous tests on different browsers, operating systems, and devices. The Selenium Grid, on the other hand, requires both qualified engineers and IT permission to develop and maintain. Furthermore, it is less secure than cloud-based laboratories, which are more versatile and powerful.
4. Inadequate reporting: In software engineering, the ability to report is quite useful. Teams must be able to track critical testing information, outcomes, and remedial activities in order to continually improve. Testers must also be able to discuss and share their findings. Because Selenium does not provide reporting out of the box, it must be supplemented with external tools.

How to Fix the Limitations of Selenium?

1. Creation: The restrictions of Selenium test creation diminish when using a smart testing platform. Creating Selenium tests without a continuous testing environment, for example, is quite difficult. It necessitates the use of highly qualified and experienced test scriptwriters. Test generation can be completely code-free when using a continuous testing platform. Furthermore, an automation tool aids test maintenance, which is critical when utilizing Selenium.
2. Execution: With a continuous testing platform, scalability is enabled via faster testing across platforms with a single test script, and execution testing with Selenium powers solid test execution.
3. Analysis: The absence of reporting is perhaps Selenium’s biggest flaw. You get quick feedback with a smart testing solution, which lets teams zero in on what’s working and what isn’t. Furthermore, smart testing that is based on machine learning reduces noise and manages false negatives. As a result, reporting is a top priority for your developers and testers.