What is a Webdriver?

Question

Hey

I’m curious to learn what is the actual job of a web driver.. i know it’s used to automate / test device’s functionalities, but i’ve no clue how exactly it achieves that, as it uses the device itself to form the automated actions so what its purupose exactly?

Thanks

In: Technology

Answer 1

Testing websites is easy to do manually, but is tedious, time consuming, and error prone (you forget to test a certain combination of inputs, you do the inputs in the wrong order, etc). Ideally, you’d like to automate this process, but you’d need some way to define what the user interaction is like, and to describe what you expect the page to do as a result.

WebDriver is a library, part of the [Selenium project](https://www.seleniumhq.org/projects/webdriver/), that allows you to “remote control” a browser and simulate those user interactions, and to subsequently extract information from the page. Put the two together and you can write automated tests that interact with your page, and then measure how the page reacts.