The Future of Test Automation: A Comparative Analysis of Selenium vs. AI-Driven Tools

Testing automation is crucial to software development in this day and age because it results in quicker releases and better-quality software. Selenium, as the most popular automation framework, has some challenges like high maintenance effort and flaky tests due to frequent changes in the user interface. AI powered test automation tools provide self-healing aspect along with intelligent test case design and predictive analytics to mitigate these limitations. This paper includes a comparative evaluation of both Selenium, and AI powered tools regarding execution time, maintenace time spent on tests, self healing ability, and resource requirement. The experimental results from using an e-commerce application suggest that AI powered tools decrease testing failures by ninety two percent while increasing the execution efficiency by forty percent. On the contrary, they require a higher initial investment and have lower flexibility. Even though Selenium is still the most popular and flexible options available, AI powered tools seem to be more efficient when minimizing maintenance effort. Perhaps the answer to the future of test automation lies within a combined strategy that incorporates elements from both domains, which would improve both dependability and productivity.