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To satisfy the ever-growing expectations of stakeholders, product teams have to spend a significant amount of time and effort on quality assurance, diverting their focus away from developing solutions and putting a bigger time constraint on their projects. Automation testing remains one of the most critical factors in delivering software reliably and securely, and it’s often pointed as a Software Architecture metric on the surveys we have conducted. Automation testing comes with a unique set of challenges so keeping a close eye on the latest test automation trends is crucial for long-term success in software testing and development.
Automation Testing as Software Delivery
The demand for delivering quality software faster requires organizations to search for solutions in Agile, continuous integration (CI) and DevOps methodologies. The latest World Quality Report 2019–2020 by Capgemini suggests that automation testing is the biggest bottleneck to deliver “Quality at Speed,” as it is an enabler of successful Agile and DevOps adoption.
Automation testing cannot be realized without good tools; as they determine how automation is performed and whether the benefits of automation can be delivered. Automation tools are a crucial component in the DevOps toolchain. When starting an automation project, building in-house automation frameworks or using existing solutions without customization is an important decision to make.
The adoption of these tools drives the need for automation in organizations. Automation is an enabler for organizations to focus on shortening time to market while achieving the desired quality of delivery and client satisfaction. Automation tools are more capable and mature, helping teams to realize the benefits of automation as more testing activities can be automated.
Automation Testing Tools
When it comes to choosing the right tools for test automation, a single tool is never enough as there are hardly any one-size-fits-all solutions. QA testers pay a lot of attention to security, integration capability and scalability when selecting a tool for their team. So we have selected some testing automation tools that we believe will address the challenges in automation over the next few years.
Selenium it’s considered the industry standard for user interface automation testing of Web applications. To use Selenium effectively, users have to possess advanced programming skills and need to spend considerable time to build automation frameworks and libraries necessary for automation. For developers and testers who have experience and skills in programming and scripting, Selenium offers flexibility that is unseen in many other test automation tools and frameworks.
Selenium offers:
- Seamless testing experience by allowing W3C standardization.
- Users can write test scripts in many differents languages (such as Java, Groovy, Python, C#, PHP, Ruby, and Perl) that run on multiple system environments (Windows, Mac, Linux) and browsers (Chrome, Firefox, IE, and Headless browsers).
Katalon Studio is an automation solution for testing API, Web, mobile, and desktop application testing. It also has a rich feature set for these types of testing and supports multiple platforms including Windows, macOS, and Linux. Katalon Studio provides a uniquely integrated environment for testers who find difficulties in integrating and deploying different frameworks and libraries to use Selenium and Appium.
Katalon Studio offers:
- A complete feature set for test automation of API/Web services, Web, and mobile applications.
- Supports both SOAP and RESTful for API and services testing.
- Built-in keywords for creating test cases.
- Support BDD Cucumber to express test scenario in natural languages.
- Can be used for both automated and exploratory testing.
JMeter is an open-source tool designed for test loading and performance measurement. Also, JMeter is now also used for API and services testing, especially for API performance.
JMeter offers:
- Lightweight with a simple and easy-to-use user interface
- Test results can be replayed
- Support CSV files to set values for API parameters
- Support integration with CI tools such as Jenkins. JMeter is often used as a part of CI and DevOps toolchains
UFT One is a commercial tool to test Web, desktop, mobile, and RPA application. It has been extended to include a good set of capabilities for API testing. UFT One provides a convenient choice to test the AUT that operates on desktop, web, and mobile. Also it has advanced capabilities for smart object detection, image-based object detection, and correction.
UFT One offers:
- Features and enhancements that streamline the testing processes, improve testing efficiencies, and sustain quality while reducing testing time.
- Intuitive user interface for creating, executing, and reporting API tests.
- Support generating API tests from WADL documents.
- Tests’ actions, activities, and parameters can be visualized in diagrams.
LambdaTest is a cloud-based cross browser testing tool that allows you to perform cross browser testing for web applications across more than 2000 browsers, operating systems, and devices. It is a scalable testing platform that will assist your team by bringing your software assessment needs to the cloud infrastructure.
LambdaTest offers:
- Online Browser Compatibility Testing
- Testing across Latest Desktop Browsers
- Test Responsiveness on all Screen Sizes
- Continuous Collaboration during Testing
- Visual Testing
- Inbuilt Issue Tracker
- 24×7 Support
TestComplete is an automation tool that includes a set of features for Web, mobile, and desktop application testing. Testers can use JavaScript, VBScript, Python, or C++Script to write test scripts.
TestComplete offers:
- Has an object recognition engine that can accurately detect dynamic user interface elements.
- Improved AI-based algorithms to find a replacement object by its image.
- Record and playback feature,
- Insert checkpoints into test steps to verify results.
- Can be integrated easily with other products offered by SmartBear.
Postman an automation tool designed for API testing. Users can install this tool as a browser extension or a desktop application on Mac, Linux, Windows. Postman it’s popular not only among testers for API test automation but also developers who use the tool to develop and test APIs.
Postman offers:
- Comprehensive feature set for designing, debugging, testing, documenting, and publishing APIs
- Friendly and easy-to-use user interface
- Supporting both automated and exploratory testing
- Accepting Swagger and RAML API formats
- Requests and respondents can be packaged and shared with team members
Appium is an open-source automation testing tool for mobile web, hybrid applications on iOS/ Android mobile and Windows desktop platforms.
Appium offers:
- Support multiple programming languages (Java, Ruby, Python, etc.)
- Cross-platform (Android & iOS) testing on real devices, emulators, and simulators.
- Parallel sessions running Appium Chrome driver.
- XPath locators executed on elements.
TestNG is an automation testing framework inspired from JUnit which uses the annotations (@). TestNG overcomes the disadvantages of JUnit and is designed to make end-to-end testing easy. Using TestNG, you can generate a proper report, and you can easily come to know how many test cases are passed, failed, and skipped.
TestNG offers:
- Parameterized Tests.
- Test Fixture Setting.
- Custom Listeners and Reporters.
- Parallel Tests Execution.
- Groups and Dependencies Between Tests.
Gatling is an open-source load testing tool for web applications, designed for DevOps and Continuous Integration. The software is designed to be used as a load testing tool for analyzing and measuring the performance of a variety of services, with a focus on web applications. Gatling is written in Scala so it can run on both Linux and Windows machines. Also, Gatling is a code-based tool, which means you are writing Scala code to build your scripts.
Gatling offers:
- Does not have an IDE.
- Built utilizing the Akka toolkit, meaning Gatling does not need a separate thread for each user, allowing for a much larger workload to be generated on a single test machine as compared to tools like JMeter.
- Provides robust reports that allow you to analyze how your application is performing under load.
- Ready-to-present HTML reports.
- Scenario recorder and developer-friendly DSL
At the end of the day, we are looking for a tool with a wide variety of features that meet our organization’s needs while continuing to keep test generation and maintenance simple. If we look at Test Automation Landscape in 2020 conducted by Katalon, it seems that automated test prioritization is a required automation technique to be developed further in the testing industry which provides a roadmap to expand and accelerate automated testing.
