A Survey of the Selenium Ecosystem

Abstract

Selenium is often considered the de-facto standard framework for end-to-end web testing nowadays. It allows practitioners to drive web browsers (such as Chrome, Firefox, Edge, or Opera) in an automated fashion using different language bindings (such as Java, Python, or JavaScript, among others). The term ecosystem, referring to the open-source software domain, includes various components, tools, and other interrelated elements sharing the same technological background. This article presents a descriptive survey aimed to understand how the community uses Selenium and its ecosystem. This survey is structured in seven categories: Selenium foundations, test development, system under test, test infrastructure, other frameworks, community, and personal experience. In light of the current state of Selenium, we analyze future challenges and opportunities around it.

Automated driver management for Selenium WebDriver

“…Applying the Pareto principle again, it can be discovered the few vital answers, which in this case correspond to chomedriver for Chrome (38.64%), geckodriver for Firefox (25.85%), and msedgedriver for Edge (11.65%). These results are aligned with a recent analysis of the Selenium ecosystem, in which the top evergreen browser used with Selenium WebDriver were precisely Chrome, Firefox, and Edge [29].…”

“…A recent study about the Selenium ecosystem reports that maintainability and flakiness are the main problems related to Selenium test suites [29]. A test is said to flaky when it is unreliable, i.e., it fails or passes under the same conditions [43].…”

“…As introduced before, a fundamental aspect of Selenium WebDriver is the usage of proper drivers to automate browsers using their native support. To the best of our knowledge, there is no relevant literature about the management of these drivers, which is, in many cases, done manually [29]. This can be interpreted as an indicator of the necessity for this work.…”

“…A recent survey about the Selenium ecosystem shows that the management (i.e., download, setup, and maintenance) of the required driver of Selenium Web-Driver is done manually by practitioners in most cases [29]. This manual process brings extra complexity to the development and maintenance of Selenium Web-Driver scripts.…”

“…The W3C WebDriver recommendation is also based on JSON messages sent over HTTP. As of Selenium WebDriver version 4, the JSON Wire Protocol is discouraged in favor of W3C WebDriver [29].…”