Countless hours are spent testing a web app to make sure it’s functional in and outside the local development environment. Before Selenium, this testing fell to a host of manual testers, enacting and reenacting hundreds of test case scenarios on all benchmarked browsers, flagging what broke and trying to pinpoint the source of that breakage.

Depending on the size of the manual testing team, an end-to-end system test could take anywhere between days to weeks to run its course.

Today’s development methodologies work in significantly shorter time frames of two to four weeks. Shipping new, bug-free releases in that time requires deterministic, repeatable testing that provides near-instant feedback. That’s why Selenium testing is integral to development today.

Here’s a deeper look at Selenium automation testing, how the toolset that enables it came to be, and where its usage fits within fast-paced development pipelines that are common today.