Tuesday, October 31, 2017

Free automation testing tools for Web applications


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

1. Selenium
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.


2. Katalon Studio
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.


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.


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.


 5. Locust

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.