The Benefits of Standards apply to E2E Test Automation, too.

Just as various standards make life easier, Selenium WebDriver makes QA Engineer’s work easier with web test automation.

In the history of E2E Test Automation, commercial and proprietary tools, such as Mercury’s WinRunner, HP’s QTP, Microsoft Coded UI Test, IBM’s Rational Functional Tester, Tricentis’ Tosca, and SmartBear’s TestComplete, have dominated for a long time (from the 90s to 2011). But those all failed (or have largely become no longer relevant).

In 2011, finally, there was a standard for Web Test Automation by W3C: WebDriver. There were some inspiring success stories at large companies, such as Google and Facebook.

“Facebook is released twice a day, and keeping up this pace is at the heart of our culture. With this release pace, automated testing with Selenium is crucial to making sure everything works before being released.” — DAMIEN SERENI, Engineering Director at Facebook, at Selenium 2013 conference.

Microsoft dumped its Coded UI Test tool and recommended Selenium for web test automation.