Over time the Web and App development practices changes and the same can be seen in terms of tools and technologies used. Such changes are meant to make improvements in terms of quality, productivity, customer satisfaction and to work towards delivering products and services successfully by working on having shorter delivery time.
This means that when it comes to reaching such objectives, the role played by Web and App testing is huge.
As per the World Quality Report 2017-2018, a good number of trends in terms of software quality and testing has come up. Here three top trends have been discussed and from that, the two of them were – increased adoption of DevOps and agile technologies and rise in test automation.
In order to speed up the decision-making process and to address the issues of testing smarter products and devices, there is a need for intelligent automation and intelligent analytics for the organizations.
When we talk about automation, the automation tools have a key role to play. So here in this post, we are discussing about the top test automation tools and frameworks which you can use for your project in 2020.
Selenium
When it comes to testing automation, Selenium is the most common name in the market. When you are working with your web application and going on with user interface automation testing, then it is considered as the industry standard.
Today the majority of the testers are making use of Selenium in their projects. Selenium offers better flexibility compared to other frameworks and tools to the developers and testers who have better skills and experience with programming. Users can write test scripts for different languages like Python, Groovy, Ruby, Java, C#, Perl and PHP and run them on different browsers and system environments.
The first Alpha version of Selenium was released in April 2019 and Selenium 4 is yet to hit the market, but it is said that it is expected to come with enhanced and better features. It is essential for users to have better programming skills to use Selenium effectively and need to spend enough time in order to build libraries and frameworks that are needed for automation.
Selenium comes with a number of features and some of them are:
- Faster automated screenshot testing
- Online browser compatibility testing
- Smart visual regression testing
- Easy and smooth testing and collaboration
- In-built issue tracker
- Locally hosted pages testing
- Resolution display testing
- Responsiveness of all screen sizes checked
LambdaTest
LambdaTest is a cross-browser testing cloud. It is used by testers and developers to carry out cross-browser testing on a number of operating systems and real browsers over different screen resolutions. You can use LambdaTest to test on the latest desktop and mobile browsers over the cloud. By using LambdaTest for real-time browser compatibility testing, you can be sure that your website is compatible across all the browsers. To carry out testing, it is possible for you to choose from latest to oldest versions of Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer, Yandex, and Edge. With it, you can even take automated screenshots that are full paged and even test for responsiveness.
Here is what a LambdaTest Offers:
- Testing Locally Hosted Websites
- In-Built Image Editor
- One-Click Bug Logging
- Get Shareable Link
- Basic Authentication For Password Protected Websites Or Web App
- Save Selected Browsers For Quick Screenshot Testing
- Email Me On Completion
- History Or Recent Test Sessions
- Responsive Testing On A Variety Of Screen Resolutions
Katalan Studio
Katalan Studio is a powerful automation tool which is used to test mobile and web apps, and APIs. It offers support for different platforms which includes Linux, macOS, and Windows and comes with the feature-rich set, which can help with testing.
Katalan Studio comes with a uniquely integrated environment by leveraging Selenium Appium engines for testing. This helps explicitly the testers who find issues when it comes to integrating and deploying different libraries and frameworks to make use of Appium and Selenium. It also works well for those people who knew these engines better.
It was in March 2019 that Katalan Studio was named as the best choice for Gartner Peer Insights Customers for carrying out software test automation. It is considered a key player in the market after it received more than 450 positive reviews.
Some highlights of the tool that you should not ignore are:
- A complete set of features which are used for test automation of web and mobile applications and web or API services.
- For API and service testing, it supports both RESTful and SOAP.
- It can be used for both exploratory and automated testing.
- For creating test cases comes with hundreds of built-in keywords.
- To express test scenario in natural languages, it supports BDD Cucumber.
- By making use of plugins from Katalan Store, the testing capability of the tool can be extended.
HP UFT
If you are looking for a cross-platform automation testing tool, the HPE Unified Functional Test is the leading choice. It can automate Desktop, web, PeopleSoft, Oracle, PowerBuilder, SAP, Java, Stingray, Delphi, Mobile, Siebel, Flex, Visual Basic, ActiveX, Net as well as others.
As a scripting language, UFT makes use of VBScript. It is strongly integrated with HP LoadRunner and HP ALM. Robust checkpoints, keyword-driven framework, business process testing, test results, and XML support are some of the outstanding features of UFT. It also offers advanced capabilities for image-based object detection, smart object detection, and correction.
Some of the highlights of the tool are:
- From WADL documents generate API tests.
- For creating, executing and reporting API tests, it offers an easy to use user interface.
- The activities, actions, and parameters of the tests can be brought to diagrams for visualization.
SoapUI
If you are looking for a test automation tool for mobile or web app testing, then SoapUI is not what you need. This tool helps with testing API and services and we can say that it has been specifically designed to take care of this area.
This tool offers support for both SOAP and REST services. An open-source and a pro-version are available for the API automation testers to choose from and use. The pro-edition comes with advanced features like SQL query builder, form editor and assertion wizard, and has a user-friendly interface.
SoapUI offers a set of feature set which can be used for API testing and comes with a number of advanced capabilities like:
- Asynchronous testing
- Using point-and-click and drag and drop for generating tests.
- Easily reusable scripts
- Data-driven testing which uses data from databases and files
- Using RESTful mocking for creating mock services
Ranorex
Ranorex is not a new thing in the world of automation testing tools and this one offers a complete set of features for API, mobile, web and desktop testing. Ranorex comes with advanced capabilities for identifying, editing and managing UI elements by leveraging its experience on working with desktop-based test automation.
Just like Katalan Studio, Ranorex comes with intuitive UI, script generation and record/playback which make automation testing easy.
It is possible for the testers to integrate Selenium Grid with Ranorex to make parallel test executions possible through distributed testing.
Here are some awesome features Ranorex offers
- It helps to identify elements and maintain them in the object repository.
- Can be used in both web as well as mobile technologies.
- It helps to solves the challenges with easy-to-use tools for codeless test automation
- It capture and replay functionality to build reliable automated test cases without writing a single line of code.
- Directly utilize the Ranorex API and create robust test automation projects
- Advanced debugging, refactoring and code completion mechanisms
TestComplete
TestComplete still remains as one of the testing tools which offer a comprehensive and powerful set of features for mobile, web and desktop application testing. To write test scripts, testers make use of VBScript, JavaScript, C++ or Python. TestComplete comes with object recognition engine which can be used to detect dynamic user interface elements. The applications which have frequently changing or dynamic user interfaces can gain from this engine.
The latest version of this tool offers support for web testing components like custom elements and Shadow DOM, native integration for Jenkins in order to boost CI/CD pipeline as well as provides support for mobile platforms and browser versions hit the market recently.
TestComplete comes with feature like record and playback which can be used by the testers. To verify the results, the testers can out in checkpoints in every step. You can easily integrate it with other products of SmartBear as it comes from them. It is possible to carry out keyword-driven and data-driven testing using TestComplete.
Moreover, here, testers do not have to deal with the changes in AUT as the tool controls the test scripts.
- Use the scriptless Record and Replay or keyword-driven tests to easily create automated UI tests.
- AI enabled Object Recognition Engine to test any application.
- One html 5 test to run it across all of the latest as well as deprecated versions of popular browsers.
- In-depth report logs on your automated test results to fix error faster
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Build and execute modular test scripts for re-usability across projects
Robot framework
Robot framework is an automation framework that is open source in nature. This framework helps with acceptance of test-driven development and acceptance testing. Whatever be the test automation needs of different frameworks, Robot framework offers them in a better way. It is possible to get more from the framework in terms of testing by adding in more test libraries using Java and Python. Robot framework also makes use of an external library named Selenium WebDriver.
Apart from web testing, testers can make use of the Robot framework for mobile testing for Android and iOS frameworks.
Here are some awesome feature Robot Framework
- High-Level Architecture
- Simple Tabular Syntax
- Data-driven Test Cases
- Separate Test Data Editor
- Clear Reports
- Detailed logs
- Generic test libraries
Watir
Watir is an open-source testing framework which is used for carrying out web automation testing for the projects which are dependent on Ruby libraries. This framework also helps with cross-browsing testing for headless browser, IE, Firefox and Opera. It also includes BBD tools like RSpec, Cucumber and Test/Unit and supports data-driven testing. Here the scripts are written in Ruby language and it lets the testers carry out testing in the continuous delivery lifecycle. Watir even comes with a built-in recorder and supports multiple domains.
What WATIR offers you
- It’s a free Open Source tool.
- WATIR is “Web Application Testing in Ruby”.
- Functional testing tool for automating browser-based tests of web applications.
- There’s a very active and growing community behind it.
- It uses Ruby, a full-featured modern scripting language, rather than a proprietary vendorscript.
- It supports your web app irrespective of what it is developed in.
- It supports multiple browsers on different platforms.
- Watir is a family of Ruby libraries but it supports all other technologies
- Whilst Watir supports only Internet Explorer on Windows, Watir-WebDriver supports Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera and also running in headless mode (HTMLUnit).
- Ruby gives you the power to connect to databases, read data files and spreadsheets, export XML, and structure your code as reusable libraries.
IBM Rational Functional Tester
IBM Rational Functional Tester is a data-driven testing platform which is used for regression and functional testing. It makes use of Java and Visual Basic .Net as scripting languages. It offers support for applications built using Ajax, .Net, Flex, SAP and Java. This tool comes with a unique feature called Storyboard testing, which can be used to record the actions of the users on AUT. IBM RFT also offers integration for IBM Jazz application lifecycle management tools.
Here are some of the features Rational Functional Tester offers:
- Simplify test creation and visualization with Storyboard testing
- Provides Life cycle trace ability
- Ensure playback resilient to application changes with Script Assure technology
- Validate dynamic data with dynamic data validation wizard
- Increase script re-use with wizard for data driven test creation
- Streamline automation with keyword testing
- Test script version control for parallel development
- Linux test editing and test execution support
- Includes support for testing on Siebel, Adobe Flex applications, SAP and 3270/5250 terminal-based applications.
Conclusion
So here we have seen a number of leading automation tools available in the market. If you have gone through them, you must have understood one thing for sure that each one of them comes with its set of unique features which are capable of addressing the issues and challenges that we have been facing for years in terms of software automation.
Most of them listed here offer you with test management, continuous testing and integration, and reporting. They are ready to deal with all the automation needs in the area of mobile and web testing.
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