Selenium is a powerful tool for automating web testing, but it's essential to understand its strengths and limitations before writing tests. To increase the chances of success, define a test strategy by answering four questions: how your business generates value, how users use your application, what browsers are used, and what have broken in the application before. This will help narrow down efforts to critical functionality and browsers. Choose a programming language that suits Selenium well, considering factors such as who will own the tests, available open-source frameworks, and ease of development. For this course, Java is chosen, but other languages like Python or Ruby can also be used. Selecting an integrated development environment (IDE) like Eclipse or IntelliJ is crucial for productivity when writing Java code.