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Software Testing — Manual and Automation Module 3 · Lesson 7 of 15

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Module 3 · Automation with Selenium and a real project Lesson 7 of 15

Your first Selenium script in Python

Learning objective

Selenium drives a real browser. pip install selenium, open a page, find an element, assert its text — four lines, and you have automated a check that used to be manual.

The concept

Selenium drives a real browser from code: install it, download the driver (or let Selenium Manager do it), and write driver = webdriver.Chrome(); driver.get(url) — then find an element and act on it: driver.find_element(By.ID, 'email').send_keys('a@b.com'), .click(), and an assertion on what appeared.

Structure it as a script that does one journey end to end — open the site, search jobs, open the first result, check the apply button exists — and print a clear pass or fail per step. That single script is a credible automation portfolio item, and it is the same shape as every test suite you will ever write, just bigger.

Python
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By

driver = webdriver.Chrome()
try:
    driver.get("http://localhost:3000/login")
    driver.find_element(By.ID, "email").send_keys("a@b.com")
    driver.find_element(By.ID, "password").send_keys("correct-password")
    driver.find_element(By.CSS_SELECTOR, "button[type=submit]").click()

    heading = driver.find_element(By.TAG_NAME, "h1").text
    assert heading == "Dashboard", heading
finally:
    driver.quit()

Common mistakes

The mistake is writing a hundred assertions before the first one runs green. Get one line working against a real page, then add the next. Selenium errors say exactly which selector failed and what it waited for; the first one is the only one worth reading.

Worked example

driver.get("https://example.com") then find_element(By.TAG_NAME, "h1").text gives you a string you can assert on. Everything else in Selenium is a variation of find, act, assert.

Your practice task

Automate one signup-form check: open the page, type into three fields, submit, and assert the confirmation text.

Do this before moving on. Reading a solution teaches the shape of it; typing it teaches you.

Key takeaway

Selenium drives a real browser from code: install it, download the driver (or let Selenium Manager do it), and write driver = webdriver.Chrome(); driver.get(url) — then find an element and act on it: driver.find_element(By.ID, 'email').send_keys('a@b.com'), .click(), and an assertion on what appeared.

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Finish every lesson to unlock the certificate. Each one ends in a practice task — do them and the final project brief writes itself.

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