Common Challenges In Selenium Automation

Welcome QA community

In this article, I would like to explain most technical challenges of Selenium automation. I know most of the automation engineers know selenium automation. There are so many tutorials on YouTube as well as websites to learn selenium. However, in the practical environment, we face some selenium challenges. Let me explain some common challenges.

1. Pop up and alert handling

Mainly we can see 3 types of pop-ups.

1. Browser level pop-ups

These kinds of pop-ups do not need to handle using selenium. we can handle it through the browser-level settings.

Ex: Allow/Decline location access, Allow/Decline camera access, Allow/Decline microphone access, Allow/Decline storage access.

2. Web-based pop-ups

These kinds of alerts can be handled using Selenium’s already defined class “Alerts,” which provide various methods like dismiss (), accept (), switchTo()

Ex: Do you want to remove this item, this site says…., Please enter your username

3. OS level pop-ups

OS level pop-ups cannot be performed using Selenium. These types of pop-up objects cannot be accessed using Selenium Locators. Robot class is commonly used for interaction with such pop-ups.

2. Controlling dynamic elements

Many web site and web applications have dynamic web elements. web pages are user-specific and display different data for different users based on their requirements. new data appears on the web page after a certain period or when a user clicks something on the page.

Example: E bay is an e-commerce application whose catalog changes overtime and reacts differently with different content

We can also use selenium functions such as starts-with, contains ends with to handle dynamic objects. We can even create dynamic or custom XPath and dynamic CSS selectors for handling dynamic web content.

3. Page loading delay issue

Some of the web application elements are different.

Sometimes AJAX-based code takes a lot of time for web page load, which also becomes a possible reason for test script failure.

we have waits integrated with Selenium like Implicit wait and Explicit wait, which can be helpful in such cases.

4. Mobile testing automation

You cannot do mobile application testing through selenium. It’s not supported for mobile test automation. Selenium supports more operating systems as well as browsers but it’s not running on IOS and android.

We have an alternative solution to mobile test automation. Appium, an open-source automation testing framework that uses WebDriver protocol to drive native, hybrid, and iOS and Android mobile apps can be used.

5. Sync issue or time out

This issue is the most common challenge in selenium test automation. Though this problem can be avoided using smart waits like Implicit waits and explicit waits that are available within Selenium. You can write your own custom method to handle the sync issues.

Explicit wait in selenium is used to tell the web driver to wait for certain expected conditions.

Implicit wait in selenium is used to tell the web driver to wait for a certain amount of time before it throws a No Such Element Exception. The default setting is 0.