Importance of Mouse Hover Actions in GUI Testing

Mouse hover actions are also essential for GUI (Graphical User Interface) testing as they play a significant role for several reasons, such as:

1. Simulating User Interaction: Mouse hover actions are a frequent method for simulating users’ interactions with the various web elements in the GUI interface. It is said to be the crucial testing method to check whether the program runs as intended.
2. Checking Responsiveness: Software responsiveness can be checked and tested with mouse hover actions. Responsiveness here, which bothers the audience is the change in the appearance and display of the web elements or the contents present on the web when hovered over.
3. User Interface Consistency: Consistency in GUI testing with the user interface is also essential, as any inconsistency, such as the appearance or response of the same hovered element again and again, creates much confusion and frustration among the users while working with it.
4. Bug Detection: Bugs like broken or unauthorized links, any missing tooltip, unresponsive buttons, or other unexpected behavior can be identified, tested, rectified, or reported by the testers or developers with the help of GUI testing or mouse hover actions, leading to the early development process.
5. Compatibility Testing: Compatibility testing of various browsers or platforms is also done with mouse hover actions. This deals with performance issues that occurred due to different browsers’ performance dependencies, which later got uncovered and handled.

Selenium is an open-source Web Automation tool that supports many user actions in the web browser. For automating a web page the mouse movement is the most important action taken by the users, so to perform the mouse actions the selenium provides a class called Actions. The Action class provides the method for all mouse user and Keyboard actions. Some of the important mouse events offered by the Action class are: moving the cursor pointer to an element, double-clicking, right-clicking, and frag and drop.