How To Choose The Right Automation Language?

by Manik Sharma · Published June 20, 2022 · Updated June 27, 2022

Automation is a technique of controlling or operating a process by automatic means with minimal human intervention. There are many benefits of automation such as:-

Increased Employee Satisfaction:- Manual tasks can be monotonous and tiring for the employees. Automation allows employees to work on more exciting and challenging activities. Thus, making it engaging for the employees.
Improved quality and Consistency Of the Work:– Automation reduces the chances of human errors. Therefore, it helps in delivering quality results which in turn increases the quality of the work.
Time-Saving :– It also reduces redundant work and is effective in completing the work faster. Thus, saving time for the employees.
Increased Customer Satisfaction:- With Automation, employees take up the challenging and exciting work in their stride and deliver the best quality work which in turn increases customer satisfaction.

Pre-requisite To Learn Automation

Programming Language:-Automation demands you to be good in any programming language. This is the first and the foremost thing required if you want to learn automation.
Basics Of Testing:– To learn automation you need to know at least the basics of testing.
Any Automation Tool Of your Choice:– If you want to learn automation then, you need to have knowledge of any of the automation tools prior.

How To Choose The Right Automation Language?

Are you a beginner in automation testing? This article will help you make a decisive choice to choose the programming language for automation. While choosing a proper automation language, you need to keep a few basic conditions in your mind. These criteria evaluate language not only from the viewpoint of the comfort of use and purity but also from the standpoint of solving the use cases of the problems easily.

Powerful Command Line:- High-quality Command Line Interface(CLI) helps in facilitating the process of launching checks.
Elegance:– Conversion of the test case into the program code should be simple and clear.
Easy Build Integration:– Build automation should be able to instantly report errors.
IDE Support:– Easy Integration Development Environment(IDE) should be available.
Industry Adoption:– Language support should be constantly revolutionizing and evolving.
Usability:– Memory management is a major issue, programming language should be able to manage memory easily.
Available test frameworks:– Programming language should be easily able to integrate with the automation frameworks.
Open Source:– Open source basically offers source code that is available free of charge to the public. It is used for modification from its original design. This is a great advantage to the automation team.

Trending Automation Tool In The Industry:- Selenium

Selenium is the first thing that comes to mind when one is planning to test web applications using Automation. Selenium is a beneficial tool not only because it is open source but it is also a portable software testing framework for web applications that has the support of multiple languages such as JAVA, C#, Ruby, Python. Choosing the right language totally depends on the application under test, usability, elegance, and, seamless build integration. It is the most prominent tool in the field of automation testing.

Introduction To Selenium

Selenium is the most popular open-source tool that is widely used for automating web applications. In simple language, you can only test web applications using Selenium. A desktop application or mobile application cannot be tested using Selenium. To overcome this, you have other software tools available in the market. Despite the availability of many tools in the market for testing purposes, Selenium dominates the world of automation testing.

Advantages Of Using Selenium

Tests can be carried out on any OS platform or environment such as Windows, Mac, or Linux.
Selenium offers easy integration with the tools like Junit, TestNG that allow easier test management and reporting.
Testing can be carried out on a wide range of browsers such as Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Safari, Opera, or Mozilla Firefox.
It can even be used for continuous integration tasks through effective integration with Docker, Maven, and other CICD tools such as Jenkins.
It is open-source and is available to the masses for free.
In Selenium a wide range of programming languages is used to write test cases such as JAVA, Python, C#, Ruby, Perl &.Net. But, among all JAVA s most widely used.

What Is JAVA?

JAVA is a cross-platform object-oriented programming language that was released by Sun Microsystems in the year1995. It is the most widely used and oldest programming language because of its robust nature. This language is free to access and can run on all platforms.

JAVA is an object-oriented and class-based programming language.
JAVA is concurrent where you can execute multiple statements instead of sequentially executing them.
JAVA is a platform-independent language i.e. the compiled code can run all platforms which support JAVA.

Why Is JAVA Preferred With Selenium?

Selenium and JAVA is the most perfect combination to run the automated test on multiple browsers. It is the most popularly used programming language for Selenium all over the world. JAVA turns out to be the most preferred language by the professionals who use Selenium in their day-to-day lives.

Below are a few of the reasons why JAVA is preferred with Selenium:

JAVA has huge community support along with a massive repository.
The execution of programs is faster in JAVA as compared to any other language.
Nearly 78% of the Selenium Testers are using JAVA which ultimately helps in knowledge sharing.
To run a JAVA code you need a JVM, which makes it a platform-independent language. In simple words, we can use it in any Operating environment where JVM is installed.
JAVA also provides the support of Integrated JAVA Environment(IDE). IDEs provide a lot of feedback on errors while compiling the code.

What Is Required To Learn In JAVA For Selenium?

In order to use JAVA for Selenium, you should have a brief about the basics of JAVA along with the below-mentioned topics

Data Types
Keywords
Access Modifiers
Conditional Statements(if, else, switch)
Methods
Strings
Iterative Statements/Loops( for, while, do-while, foreach)
Arrays
Objects and Classes
OOPS Concepts(Abstraction, Encapsulation, Inheritance, Polymorphism)
Collections
Exception handling
Packages

Why Selenium With JAVA Is Preferred By Developers As Well?

Selenium with JAVA has become the main choice for most developers because a good community of developers is there which helps in proper documentation and timely resolution of issues, which ultimately has helped JAVA to become the most preferred language among the application developers. Moreover, JAVA is more widely used in commercial applications as compared to any other programming language and hence it makes Selenium test cases integration easier.

Pre-requisites of Using Selenium With JAVA

Selenium with JAVA is easier to use as compared to other languages. But, there are certain pre-requisites that need to be followed before kickstarting testing.

Install JDK(Java Development Kit)
Install Eclipse(Integrated Development Environment) which is the IDE for JAVA.
Selenium bindings
Downloading executable file of the chrome driver or the driver where the test execution will be done.
Configuring Selenium WebDriver with Eclipse.

Selenium with JAVA Testing Using Trending Platform- LambdaTest

LambdaTest is a test execution platformin the market for Selenium Testing. It has made the world of Selenium testing hassle-free. With Lambda Test, you can perform cross-browser automation testing across more than 3000 browsers and OS on its cloud-based Selenium Grid, which gives you higher test coverage. It gives you a detailed insight into how your web application renders across different browsers.

With LambdaTest integrations, you can integrate with multiple third-party tools of the CI/CD pipeline. You can also fetch detailed test reports of your Selenium Test Execution over the LambdaTest platform, along with other useful features such as video recording of the test script, command-by-command screenshots, test analytics, logs on the LambdaTest platform. Thus, LambdaTest is the best choice for doing automation using Selenium with JAVA.

Wrapping Up

By now, you must have realized why JAVA is the most preferred and widely used language with Selenium. In the article, you learned the importance of Automation testing and also how you can choose the right programming language. We also covered why JAVA is the most popular language and why do developers generally prefer JAVA with Selenium to any other language.

Choosing the language to run your automated tests solely depends on the tester, and it may vary from project to project or organization to organization.

Author Bio: Vixit Raj is E&C Engineer by education and digital marketer by profession. He is currently handling Product Growth and Marketing in LambdaTest: The Cross Browser Web App Testing Application.Vixit’s curiosity, technical skills and 5+ years of digital marketing domain expertise always push him to learn more about Product Development, Latest Technology Advancements, Coding & Testing.