Selenium, the open-source project that automates web browsers, turns 20 this year. What a wild ride. Selenium has been particularly important to me since I entered the test automation world in 2010, not long after the Selenium project merged with the WebDriver project to create the beloved Selenium WebDriver in 2009.
I won't say that I grew up wishing to get away from my small town to live a glamorous life of writing test automation in the big city, but I can say that I fell into software testing accidentally, like many other testers I've met. When I first tried out Selenium RC - the most current available version of Selenium at the time - I knew it would be a big deal in the software world. When I got a hold of Selenium 2.0, with a vastly improved design, it was off to the races.
I was fortunate in my early career to dig into Selenium and learn how it works. I wrote a whole browser testing framework in Java, learning the nuts and bolts of how the WebDriver worked. I also had the pleasure of working with test automation tools for desktop application automation, which gave me a nice contrast between different kinds of tooling. Selenium had several advantages over other tools at the time:
Free open source meant that anyone (anyone!) could use the WebDriver and related tools like the Selenium Grid, whether a single developer or a large software company. This was a big improvement over closed-source proprietary tools, often expensive and restricted by licensing.
Cross-browser support saw that the WebDriver worked with major browsers and potentially new browsers as well and wasn't restricted to a single ecosystem. You could test on Firefox and Internet Explorer at the same time!
Adhering to web standards meant that even if all members of the Selenium project were wiped out in a bizarre gardening accident, other browser automation tools and projects could be developed.
Since then, both Selenium and myself have seen some success. I've had a successful career as a test automation specialist, including spending some time at Sauce Labs as a solution architect. Selenium has also grown in usage and prominence. Selenium has been so successful that it has spurred the development of other browser automation tools, such as Playwright, and mobile automation tools, such as Appium. Several of these tools also followed in the footsteps of Selenium by building in cross-browser support and being open sourced. Even folks who, for whatever reason, dislike Selenium can see the project's impact over the past two decades in the web development world.
Cheers to Selenium, and let's see what the next twenty years bring!
