For decades, the proliferation of different IT solutions and quality software has resulted in a diverse and complicated quality management system (QMS) landscape. Until now, the price of testing and upgrading monolithic IT solutions has been quite expensive. Moreover, the scarcity of IT support teams, repetitive workflows, and evolving regulatory requirements have severely challenged application/software deployment.
In recent years, however, innovative digital and intelligent technologies have made it easier for quality teams to test applications from different sources and in various formats, without replacing existing systems. By combining such technologies with Test Automation, companies can now deploy dynamic user experiences in applications at a fraction of the cost of traditional or manual testing. There are also innovative smart testing tools out there that leverage artificial intelligence or machine learning, and help enterprises create intelligent testing scenarios.
The Need For Smart Testing Tools in Test Automation
Smart testing tools are computer-aided software engineering tools that support to speed up the Test automation life cycle. Testing Tools are available to facilitate the development as well as the Test Team in seamlessly performing code reviews and unit testing. These tools are also capable of supporting the testing team and assisting them in performing regression testing, performance testing, and test management, and so on.
The test automation tool market can be categorized into two types:
- a) Proprietary Software Test Automation Tools
These tools are software developed by companies that require licenses to be purchased to work with them. Some of the leaders in developing proprietary software include HP, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Borland, and so on. The Proprietary Software Test Automation tool market is highly matured and companies provide various features for testing done by both the development team as well as the testing team. Companies offering proprietary software provide excellent support for the tool and the tools can be easily integrated with other test management, defect management tools using third-party plug-ins. These smart automation tools have many advantages, two major limitations of the proprietary software are:
- Source code of the software is a copyright of the company offering these tools and cannot be modified/customized
- The cost of licenses is very high for SME companies to adopt them.
- b) Open Source Test Automation Tools
Open Source Software Test Automation tool market is an emerging market with companies offering intelligent testing tools free of cost and the Source code of the tools is available for modification/customization. Support is also available for these tools from the Open Source development community. With more and more agile development happening, the trend is to use open source tools for testing, as it is cost-effective and gives results much faster. Many open-source testing tools are getting adopted and are gaining momentum. The drivers for the growth of the open-source testing tool market include affordability, availability, user-friendliness, reliability, smooth integration with other tools & no lock-in period.
How Do Enterprises Adopt Smart Testing Tools?
IT Companies designing and developing systems have started adopting testing tools extensively. One of the major reasons for adoption is that the testing tools facilitate them to improve productivity, provide accurate results, deliver timely reports, platform-independent, reduce testing staffs such that they can be used in other productive activities, and so on.
Typically open source testing tools are adopted by companies who are moving from manual testing to automation or by companies who would like to supplement their existing commercial tools with open source tools. The steps in testing tool adoption are as shown below:
- The tool selection and evaluation process starts with a business case justifying the need for test automation
- The analysis of tools in the tool market, identifying potential tools, evaluating the tools based on specific parameters
- Ranking the tools and selecting the best tools for the company
- Once the tools are selected, Implementation of the tool for a pilot study is done followed by company-wide implementation.
Now, with a wide number of open-source test automation tools entering the market from time to time & the industry moving to use more than one tool, the tool selection, evaluation and implementation are repeated quite often.
Automation Testing Tools
With the adoption of Automation Testing Tools, IT companies must also start training their testing professionals on these open source or in-house testing tools. With high reliability and efficiency, more enterprises are adopting open source testing tools. Some of the well-known tools are mentioned below:
Selenium
Selenium has multiple test contents, such as:
- Selenium Grid,
- Selenium IDE,
- Selenium 1 (Selenium RC or Remote Control)
- Selenium 2 (Selenium WebDriver)
They offer different possibilities in terms of their use. Selenium also provides multi-browser support. Some of these browsers are Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Internet Explorer. In addition, it provides support for multiple operating systems and different programming languages. Examples of programming languages include Java, Python, C #, and JavaScript.
Unified Functional Testing
Unified Functional Testing is another automation test tool. In addition, the most important component of this tool is AI-based object recognition. There is also integration with Continuous Integration. This program is based on Windows and the software language is VBScript.
Appium
Appium is a tool for mobile testing. IOS and Android support are available. In addition, using WindowsAPPDriver, the windows operating system enables automation within mobile devices. There are client libraries in Java, Ruby, Python, PHP, JavaScript, and C#, which supports Appium’s extensions to the WebDriver protocol. In Addition to these, Appium can provide REST API testing.
Leveraging efficient Test Automation Services have become a competitive necessity to survive in the ever-growing digital market and IT companies are gaining a maximum advantage by adopting them. The adoption has become a necessity to such an extent that testing professionals recruited are expected to have expertise in open-source testing tools. With the right Test Automation tool, an enterprise can effectively increase ROI and efficiently perform tests for clients.
Author Bio
Ricky Philip is an industry expert and a professional writer working at ThinkPalm Technologies. He works with a focus on understanding the implications of new technologies such as Test Automation Services, big data, SDN/NFV, cloud analytics, and Internet of Things (IoT) services. He is also a contributor to several prominent online publishing platforms such as DZone, HubSpot and Hackernoon.
