Why You Should Use Selenium & UFT One together (They’re Allies not Competitors)

Selenium is often, and wrongly, viewed as a competitor to UFT One.

This is understandable, they were rival products in the earlier days. At least, Selenium was a rival to QTP, UFT One’s predecessor.

Times have changed, however. Micro Focus is now a major Selenium sponsor. Today, Selenium and UFT One are allies, not competitors.

Selenium and UFT One have a long history

Did you know, selenium is a cure for mercury poisoning? Hence the name… Mercury was the big player when Selenium was released.

UFT traces its lineage back to Mercury QuickTest Professional (QTP), but UFT has gone through significant changes since then.

UFT One Provides Much More than QTP Ever Did

Where QTP was squarely focused on testers, UFT One has a much broader appeal. UFT now supports:

1. Business Users – through Business Process view
2. Testers – through Keyword view
3. Developers – through their IDE – using UFT Developer

You might not be aware of UFT Developer; it was previously known as LeanFT and is included with UFT One or as a standalone product. As the name suggests, UFT Developer is a developer focussed, code-driven automation tool. 

Selenium and UFT now work seamlessly together 

Thankfully, Selenium and UFT are now allies, not competitors. Micro Focus is actually a key Selenium sponsor and have created ‘UFT Developer for Selenium’ plugin to allow seamless integration between the solutions.

You can run Selenium scripts through UFT Developer

Micro Focus ‘UFT Developer for Selenium’ provides the integration between the 2 solutions. It extends the Selenium API, speeding up Selenium scripting, increasing script robustness and significantly reducing maintenance. UFT Developer for Selenium includes the following:

1. .NET, Java, and JavaScript SDKs that extend the WebDriver API with additional locators and utilities. These allows you to create more robust object identification and use built-in utilities (rather than writing utilities yourself from scratch)
2. IDE project templates for Selenium projects. These allow you to create projects that are ready for Selenium automation
3. Selenium Object Identification Center. This allows you to automatically build and validate object recognition code. This increases scripting speed and allows more generic, and therefore more stable, object recognition.

Why You Should Use Selenium with UFT

Put simply, You will save significant time by using UFT Developer. You can reduce your scripting and maintenance time by as much as 50-100%.  When this time saving is weighed against the small cost of the tool, your ROI is huge.

By pairing Selenium with UFT One, you open up a wide range of productivity enhancements:

1. Faster test creation: Your developers can use UFT object recognition to quickly spy objects. This provides huge speed benefits over the traditional approach – interrogating an object, manual creating the code snippets
2. Reduced script maintenance: Objects scanned through UFT are more robust and therefore require less maintenance. UFT achieves this by creating more generic objects. UFT scanned objects are much less susceptible to change than traditional Selenium code. 
3. A complete End-to-End Testing solution: Selenium with UFT provides a single framework for your developers to create their automated unit tests, your testers to create keyword driven integration tests, and your business users to create process level end-to-end tests. Assets can be shared and reused between stages, with consistent reporting, visibility and test audit through your project and into BAU.

Try Selenium and UFT for yourself – get a free trial of UFT One today