Here, we will discuss Selenium Interview Questions and Answers, which interviewers mainly ask for a Quality Assurance Engineer in company interviews.
Table of Contents
1. What is Quality Assurance Engineer?
QAE (Quality Assurance Engineer) ensures software quality via testing. Key skills: test planning, manual/automation testing (Selenium, Appium), SDLC understanding, defect tracking (JIRA), API testing (Postman), CI/CD (Jenkins), frameworks (TestNG, BDD). Interview focus: test scenarios, automation scripting, bug lifecycle, Agile/DevOps, tools proficiency, problem-solving.
2. Selenium Interview Topics for QAE
- Components: Selenium WebDriver, IDE, Grid.
- Locators: XPath, CSS selectors, ID, etc.
- Waits: Implicit vs. Explicit waits for synchronization.
- Frameworks: TestNG/JUnit integration, data-driven testing, Page Object Model (POM).
- Handling Elements: Dynamic elements, iframes, alerts, pop-ups.
- Cross-Browser Testing: Configuring drivers for Chrome, Firefox, etc.
- Selenium Grid: Parallel execution on multiple machines.
- Challenges: Handling AJAX calls, stale elements, and browser compatibility.
- CI/CD Integration: Jenkins, Docker.
- Alternatives: Cypress, Playwright (pros/cons).
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Selenium Interview Questions and Answers
1. What is Selenium?
Selenium is an open-source, automated testing tool for testing web applications across various browsers.
However, the sad part is that it can only test web applications, not mobile and desktop applications.
2. What is SDLC?
The crucial phase in the software development life cycle (SDLC) is testing. There are two types of Testing-
- Manual Testing: It involved the physical execution of test case scenarios against the applications to detect errors and bugs.
This posed a lot of challenges and heavy manual effort. - Automation Testing: Automation Testing provided us with a way to automate the testing processes and increased the demand.
3. What is automation testing?
The use of automation tools for writing and executing the test cases with no manual involvement for executing the Automated Test Suite is called Automation Testing.
The Automation tools are preferred by Testers to write the test cases or test scripts and then group them all into Test Suites. These tools are designed to execute manually designed test cases without any human intervention.
Some of the advantages of Automation Testing include:
- Save Money and Time.
- Automation Testing increases the accuracy as there is no chance for human errors.
- Code Reusability. Create once and execute multiple times with little or no maintenance.
- Easy Reporting. Automatically generates the reports after the execution of the test cases.
- Easy for Compatibility Testing by enabling the parallel execution in combination with OS and browser environments.
- More Reliable, Powerful, and Versatile.
- Automation Tools allow us to integrate with Jenkins, GitHub etc.,
- Mostly used for Regression Testing.
- Helps to monitor the Test Coverage and increase the test cases accordingly.
4. What are the different Selenium suite Components?
Selenium is one of the most popular automated testing suites. It’s a playback tool to perform functional testing without any knowledge of a test scripting language.
Selenium is an open-source, web UI-based automation testing suite. Jason Huggins developed this tool in 2004 at ThoughtWorks.
Selenium is not just a single tool or utility, but rather a package of several testing tools, and that’s why it’s called Selenium Suite. Each of these tools caters to different testing and testing environments.
It comprises four major components as follows:
- Selenium Integrated Development Environment (IDE): It is distributed as a Firefox plugin that acts as a record and playback tool. It is developed to speed up the creation of automation scripts.
- Selenium Remote Control (RC): Selenium Remote Control is a server with which the user can create Test cases in any desired programming language. The commands present in the test scripts are accepted by the server and sent to the browsers as the Selenium core JavaScript commands to maintain the browser behaviour accordingly.
- Selenium Web Driver: Selenium Web Driver is a programming interface to create and run test cases. It provides a way to act on various web elements. This Web driver does not require another server, unlike Selenium Remote Control.
- Selenium Grid: The Selenium Grid is used to distribute the commands to the different machines simultaneously. It paves the way for the parallel execution of the test cases in different browsers and different environments. It achieves concurrency and integrity in the Test Suite Execution.
5. What is the major difference between Selenium 3.0 and Selenium 2.0?
Selenium 3.0, often called an extension of Selenium 2.0, is inherently backward compatible with increased stability and several bug fixes, and does not involve the Selenium RC at all.
Selenium 2.0 represents the merger of the Original Selenium project with the WebDriver project. The Selenium RC got deprecated but was used for backward compatibility.
6. What do you mean by Selenese?
- Open-source
- Large support from the community and the user base is huge
- Cross-browser compatibility (Firefox, Chrome, Edge etc.,)
- Multiple programming language support (Python, Java, Perl etc.,)
- Every day or regular repository developments
- Distributed Testing is also supported.
7. How many parameters do Selenium commands have at a minimum?
Selenese, which is called the Selenium command, is the set of Selenium commands that run your test cases.
For example, open (URL) is a Selenium command that opens the specified URL in the specific browser. A test script is the sequence of all these commands put together.
There are three types of Selenese:
- Actions: We can use it to perform interactions and operations on the target elements
- Accessors: These are used for storing the values in the variables.
- Assertions: These can be used as checkpoints to keep track of the sequential flow of commands.
Four parameters that you must pass to Selenium are:
- Host: We can bind Selenium to a specific IP address instead of localhost on our local machine.
- Port Number: We can specify the port number too, i.e., TCP/IP port to connect the Selenium tests to the Grid hub. We need to make sure that there is no other application with the same port number on any other location within the same machine.
- Browser: The browser in which the Selenium scripts have to be executed.
- URL: The application URL triggers the test cases within that.
8. What is the difference between the Absolute path and the Relative Path?
Absolute Path:
- This path starts from the root node and ends with the desired elements node.
- It starts with a single slash (/)
- Example: /html.body/div/td/input
Relative Path:
- This path starts from any node between the desired elements node.
- It starts with a double slash (//)
- Example: //input/example[@id=name]
9. What is the difference between Assert and Verify statements in Selenium?
Assert statements are used to validate that a condition is true. If the condition evaluates to false, the test execution is immediately halted, and an assertion error is thrown. Typically used when the test cannot proceed without the condition being true.
For example, if you are verifying that a critical element is present on the page, failing this check would mean that the subsequent tests are irrelevant.
- Example:
Assert.assertTrue(driver.findElement(By.id("login")).isDisplayed());Verify statements are used to check if a condition is true, but unlike assert, they do not stop the test execution if the condition is false. Instead, they log the failure and continue with the next steps in the test. Useful when you want to gather multiple results from a test case and report all failures at once, rather than stopping execution at the first failure.
- Example:
SoftAssert softAssert = new SoftAssert();
softAssert.assertTrue(driver.findElement(By.id("login")).isDisplayed(), "Login button is not displayed");
softAssert.assertAll();Assert halts the test on failure, while Verify allows the test to continue.
10. What is the difference between findElement() and findElements()?
In Selenium, findElement() and findElements() are methods used to locate elements on a web page.
The key difference is that findElement() returns a single WebElement that matches the specified criteria, throwing an exception if no element is found.
In contrast, findElements() returns a list of WebElements that match the criteria; if no elements are found, it returns an empty list instead of throwing an exception.
This distinction allows for more flexible handling of element searches in automated tests.
