False ‘Selenium WebDriver Cons’

Expose the dirty tricks of fake “automated testers”, who want to hide their incompetence, and justify ‘juggling frameworks’, not doing real automated testing.

This article is one of the “Be aware of Fake Test Automation/DevOps Engineers” series.

Many test automation framework reviews listed the Pros and Cons of Selenium WebDriver, like the below ones:

• The Good and the Bad of Selenium Test Automation Software
• Pros and Cons of Selenium as an Automation Testing tool
• A Detailed Look at Selenium Pros and Cons

Though there are generally more positives on Selenium, the cons listed are so untrue, which inevitably exposed these people’s ignorance to test automation. I am not belittling the authors here, if you had read “How Google Tests Software” book and listened to Gerald Weinberg’s “Testing is Harder than Development”, you would understand: the real test automation engineers are so valuable and so rare, even the top companies like Google and Facebook found it hard to acquire. In a word, these authors made false comments on Selenium simply because they are not good test automation engineers (again, very very rare).

In this article, I will explain why those false “Selenium Cons” are wrong, in a simple, easy-to-understand and objective way.

Table of Contents:
  ∘ 'Steep learning curve'
  ∘ 'No tech support'
  ∘ 'No reporting capabilities'
  ∘ 'Not an All-in-One solution' — requires 3rd party tool bindings
  ∘ 'High Initial Cost'
  ∘ 'Slow Test Development' due to the script-based Approach
  ∘ 'Low readability of Test Scripts'

‘Steep learning curve’

Untrue. Please check out my other article showing how easy to learn Selenium WebDriver in minutes, step by step. Here I will just highlight the key facts:

• Selenium WebDriver dominates web testing in a relatively short time. Please remember, there was no sales pitch and no commissions.
• Selenium WebDriver is a W3C standard. As per other W3C standards, such as HTML, CSS, and XML, they are all quite easier to learn. I…