This
article includes the best 5 free automation testing tools for testers to
consider in web applications testing. Automation testing tools play an important role in test automation
landscape. It is critical for organizations to select the
most approriate automated testing tool as the tool is significant in speeding
up decision making of the teams. The World Quality Report 2017 -
2018 from Capgemini, Sogeti, and Marco Focus has emphasized the
significance of intelligent automation and smart analytics to help
organizations get over the challenges of automation testing that are highly
integrated and continuously changing.
- Selenium
- Katalon Studio
- Watir
- Robot framework
- Locust
Selenium is considered the most
well-known open-source test automation framework for Web app testing. Selenium
support various system environments such as Mac, Windows, and Linux. It also
works well on many browsers like Chrome, Firefox, IE, and Headless browsers.
Selenium’s scripting languages include: Java, Groovy, Python, C#, PHP, Ruby, and Perl.
Although Selenium provides the
flexibility for testers and help them generate quite advanced test scripts, it
requires testers to have very good programming skills and lots of effort in
order to build automation frameworks and libraries for different testing needs.
Selenium
is also the core framework for many open-source test automation tools like Katalon
Studio, Watir, Protractor, and Robot Framework.
Website: http://www.seleniumhq.org/
Katalon Studio is a simple and powerful
test automation tool for Web, mobile, and API testing, built on top of Selenium
and Appium. Katalon Studio is suitable
for different testing skill levels: Users with limited programming skills can
easily start their automation testing project by using Object Spy to record test scripts; Users who are
programmers or automation testing experts can build their new libraries and
maintaining the scripts to save their time and efforts.
This tool is integrated into CI/CD
processes and also works well with many common tools in QA process, for ex:
JIRA, qTest, GIT, Jenskin, and Slack. Recently, Katalon Studio offers Katalon
Analytics that helps users get the complete views of test execution reports
with metrics, graphs, and charts via its dashboard.
Website: https://www.katalon.com/
3. Watir
Watir is an open-source testing tool
for web automated testing based on Ruby libraries. It works on various browser
testing such as: Firefox, IE, Opera, and Headless browser. Watir also support
data-driven testing and has the integration with BDD tools like Cucumber,
RSpec, and Test/Unit.
Website: http://watir.com/
4. Robot framework
Robot
framework is an open-source automation framework for
different test automation needs. It implements the keyword-driven approach for acceptance
testing and acceptance test-driven development. Its capacity of testing can be
extended by adding additional test libraries with Java and Python.
Test engineers can utilize
Robot Framework for both web testing and
mobile testing. This framework is easy to learn for those who get acquainted
with keyword-driven testing.
Website: http://www.robotframework.org/
Locust is a web-based test automation
tool for website load testing. It lets the team know how many users the website
can handle at a time. Locust uses “swarm” to attack target website and is
defined by users in real-time. The tool supports Python language in writing
test scenarios, scalable and distributable to multiple machines. Locust is
lightweight due to the design, each Locust swarm run inside its own process.
Website: https://locust.io/
