In this blog, we will explore the importance of test automation, its role, and benefits, why businesses need it, and highlight the top test automation tools for 2023.

The role and benefits of test automation are multifold. Test automation helps organizations to:

• Achieve Faster Testing: Automation enables the execution of many tests in a short amount of time, allowing for faster testing cycles and quicker feedback on application quality.

• Enhance Test Coverage: Automation allows for comprehensive test coverage, ensuring that all critical functionalities and scenarios are thoroughly tested, reducing the risk of potential defects slipping through.

• Improve Accuracy: Automated tests are highly accurate and consistent, reducing the likelihood of human errors and ensuring reliable results.

• Save Time and Resources: Automation eliminates the need for repetitive manual testing tasks, freeing up resources to focus on more strategic activities, such as test design and analysis.

• Enhance Collaboration: Automation facilitates collaboration among different teams, such as developers, testers, and business stakeholders, enabling faster issue resolution and better alignment on testing objectives.

• Enable Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD): Automation enables seamless integration with CI/CD pipelines, allowing for faster and more frequent releases of software applications.

Also Read:  Digital Assurance and Digital Engineering – The pillars of Digital Transformation

Top 15 Automation Testing Tools

1. Selenium

Selenium is a widely used open-source automation testing framework that supports multiple programming languages like Java, C#, and Python. It provides a wide range of features for functional testing, including cross-browser testing, parallel testing, and integration with various testing frameworks.

2. Appium

Appium is an open-source mobile automation testing framework that supports both Android and iOS platforms. It supports testing of native, hybrid, and web applications and provides a robust set of APIs for interacting with mobile devices and simulators/emulators.

3. TestComplete

TestComplete is a comprehensive automation testing tool that supports both web and desktop applications. It offers a record and playback feature, supports multiple scripting languages like JavaScript, Python, and VBScript, and provides a wide range of built-in testing functions.

4. Cucumber

Cucumber is a popular tool for behavior-driven development (BDD) that allows testers, developers, and business stakeholders to collaborate and create tests in a natural language format. It supports multiple programming languages and integrates with various testing frameworks.

5. Robot Framework

Robot Framework is an open-source, keyword-driven automation testing framework that uses a simple tabular syntax. It supports both web and desktop applications and provides an extensible set of libraries for various testing tasks.

6. TestCafe

TestCafe is a free and open-source JavaScript-based automation testing tool that supports web applications. It provides built-in support for handling multiple tabs, iframes, and pop-ups, and offers cross-browser and parallel testing capabilities.

7. JUnit

JUnit is a popular testing framework for Java applications that provides annotations and assertions for writing unit tests. It integrates with various build tools and continuous integration (CI) servers, making it suitable for agile and DevOps environments.

8. TestNG

TestNG is another popular testing framework for Java applications that offers advanced features like support for data-driven testing, parallel testing, and test configuration through XML files. It provides rich reporting and supports integration with various tools and frameworks.

9. Protractor

Protractor is a widely used automation testing tool for Angular applications. It supports end-to-end testing and provides a built-in set of locators for testing Angular-specific elements.

10. WinAppDriver

WinAppDriver is a Windows Application Driver that allows automation of Windows desktop applications. It supports multiple programming languages like C#, Java, and Python, and provides a rich set of APIs for interacting with Windows applications.

11. Cypress

Cypress is a fast, modern, and developer-friendly automation testing framework for web applications. It provides an easy-to-use API for writing tests in JavaScript and offers features like real-time testing, debugging, and cross-browser testing.

12. SoapUI

SoapUI is a popular open-source tool for testing web services and APIs. It provides a comprehensive set of features for functional, security, and load testing of APIs, and supports multiple protocols like SOAP, REST, and GraphQL

13. Appium Studio

Appium Studio is a commercial version of Appium that offers additional features like enhanced reporting, parallel testing, and test analytics. It supports both Android and iOS platforms and provides a user-friendly interface for creating and managing tests.

14. Ranorex

Ranorex is a commercial automation testing tool that provides a wide range of features for desktop, web, and mobile testing. It offers a record and playback feature, supports multiple programming languages, and provides a rich set of reporting and analysis capabilities.

15. Katalon Studio

Katalon Studio is a popular free and open-source automation testing tool that supports web, mobile, and API testing. It provides a rich set of features for test creation, execution, and reporting, and offers integrations with various testing frameworks and tools.

Conclusion

As organizations continue to emphasize the importance of software quality and efficiency, test automation tools play a crucial role in achieving these goals. The top test automation tools for 2023, including Selenium, Appium, Cypress, TestComplete, and Robot Framework, offer advanced features, integrations, and capabilities to streamline testing efforts, improve productivity, and ensure the delivery of high-quality software products.

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In the contemporary world, Test Automation and automation testing services is adjudged as the best way to achieve enhanced efficiency, coverage, and effectiveness of any product or software.

The Software Industry is brimming with automation tools. The interesting fact is that many organizations that use 3rd party tools to utilize open source technology of some kind (Selenium, Appium, Junit, TestNG, etc.).

In this agile world, organizations look for a tool that provides the best possible features to utilize in the software testing process.

Selenium is one which is most preferred for web Application automation because of several factors.

Now let’s analyze where the current trending tools like Protractor, Jasmine, and Ranorex fit in this Selenium dominated world of test automation. Let’s travel and explore more.

Selenium:

Selenium is an open-source testing tool where it is designed especially for web application automation.

The best part of Selenium is it’s compatibility with different platforms and browsers. It provides API’s to interact with different web browsers.

Selenium Webdriver bindings come with different languages such as- Java, Python, C#, etc..

Challenges with Selenium:

• It supports Web-based applications and not for Desktop Application Automation.
• Limited support for Image Testing.
• No Built-in Reporting facility. Need to integrate with other reporting libraries like Extent Report, Allure Report, TestNg etc.
• There is no synchronization between automation test scripts and Web application. We need to explicitly synchronize tests with application using various available waits in Selenium.
• Lack of professional experts On-demand support for Enterprise Projects.
• No participation from non-technical resources.
• Not an All-in-One solution – requires 3rd party tool bindings.
• No official support from Selenium. But, it has large open community forums.
• Selenium alone can’t support for Mobile App automation. Need to use Appium

Protractor:

Test Professionals describe Protractor as an “End-to-end test framework for Angular and AngularJS apps.”

In general, Protractor is a powerful tool for web application testing. The right mix of Selenium WebDriver, NodeJS, Cucumber Jasmine, and Mocha makes it as attractive for web automation.

Though it is intended for AngularJS applications, still it performs well with non AngularJS applications as well.

Originally it was introduced into market by Google developers and became  open source in the future.

Angular JS:

In this modern world of eCommerce days, every company is interested in making an impact online.

This has actually created a huge market for web developers in market. It’s difficult to think about the development of a contemporary single page application without involving AngularJS.

The fact is it helps developers to build best applications. Thus AngularJS is coined as the next super thing in web application development.

Architecture of Protractor:

Protractor works in conjunction with selenium webdriver. Where it provides best automated test infrastructure that allows users to test Angular application running in a browser or mobile device.

Protractor is a wrapper around webdriver.js, with extra functionalities and features. To transact with browser, WebDriver utilizes Selenium JSON-Wire- Protocol.

Why to Prefer Protractor?

• Most of the Angular JS applications are entrenched with HTML attributes like ng-controller and ng-model. Selenium locators cannot find such web elements with just Selenium code. Whereas Protractor can easily find and control Angular-specific locators in the attributes of web application.
• It performs faster than Selenium because there is no need for any additional waits to use. Since Protractor can able to track the network, router changes, and execute the testing scripts accordingly.
• Does multi-browser testing on often used browsers such as Firefox, Chrome, Edge, IE11 in quicker time and in an easy way.
• Protractor works equally well for both Non-Angular and Angular web applications.
• Protractor has parallel execution feature, thus making it easier for testers to run test cases in numerous instances of any browser simultaneously.
• It has node at its core, where extensive variation of packages can be installed when needed. Which means installation of several packages and working with them is quite easy in Protractor.
• Protractor has multiple assertion libraries to work with. Though it’s easy to use with Mocha and Jasmine, with the latter being default.
• Testers can deploy their Protractor code in cloud easily. It supports Sauce Labs and Cross Browser Testing along with other cloud platforms.
• Protractor is much faster as it improves and manages synchronization to a greater extent. Also, it works equally well with headless and real browsers.

Conclusion:

To summarize Protractor provides all the capabilities of Selenium along with many other useful additions such as:

• It is well adept with synchronization and we no need to use wait on each and every element.
• It has a variety of assertions and annotations along with the ability to create our own assertions as per the requirement, which is easier than Selenium.

Overall, it is a perfect upgraded tool used to test Angular based Applications. There are numerous NPM packages available out there which can be embedded with framework smoothly. These packages will yield our framework even better.

Ranorex:

Ranorex was introduced to market in 2007 with a vision for revolutionizing the automation testing process, It is a commercial GUI based test automation tool used to test desktop, web, and mobile apps.

What makes Ranorex attractive?

• Ranorex is based on the XPath query language that facilitates efficient search of components in a web-based application.
• Ranorex record and playback interface allows tester for automating any application by recording UI actions.
• Ranorex Studio supports a broad range of environments, specifications, and settings includes:

1. Windows desktop technologies, that includes .NET, ActiveX, Delphi, Telerik, and Microsoft Office apps.
2. Mobile testing on Android and iOS platforms.

• Cross-browser testing on all major browsers like chrome, firefox, ie, etc.
• Ranorex supports in integration with DevOps environments which demand continuous testing and fast feedback to test results.
• Ranorex offers a wide range of testing tools to integrate with most CI/CD tools, test management tools.

The popularity of Ranorex:

A data-driven researcher, iDataLabs says Ranorex has close to 1.2 percent of the industry share in the automation Testing Tools category.

Ranorex is a licensed tool, but definitely it will be worth full in the long run of testing. Because of its features, it provides out of the box for automation.

While free tools such as Selenium are backed by a massive community, the Ranorex user base is smaller compared with Open Source tools.

Features of Ranorex:

• Multiplatform Application: For web, desktop, and mobile applications, while Ranorex competes with products such as Selenium, which supports web testing only.
• Codeless test creation: Codeless test creation: Drag-and-drop interface allows for conducting code less tests. Once keywords are set by team member, no programming background is needed to work with Ranorex.
• Built-in image comparison: Smart object identification technique is able to automatically detect any change in the UI. It includes GUI recognition elements( RanoreXPath ,The path editor, Ranorex Spy).
• High-quality customer support: Customer service is professional, helpful, and quick to reply.
• Execution Report: Every test run in Ranorex Studio results with automatic execution report that provides logs and also screenshots for validation. Hence this makes the workflow much easier than Selenium.

Conclusion:

Ranorex Studio is a very powerful tool to automate tests for web, standalone and mobile applications. Even non-programmers will be able to create tests without hurdles. To summarize:

• Ranorex supports multiple technologies like .Net, Java, HTML etc.
• Ranorex Spy is an object recognition tool which identifies the hierarchy of UI elements in any application.
• Ranorex Recorder allows recording of test steps and replaying the same to test application with different input data.
• The repository contains all the UI elements and their unique logical path.

Overall Summary

Maintaining the quality of an application and ensuring a bug-free product is crucial for the success of any project.

In Automation testing phase, Tool selection is a vital part. Though each tool is a good player on its own ground.

But considering, project requirements such as project type (Web/Desktop/Mobile), scope of the project, existing team’s strength, tool that integrates seamlessly with their project planning & test management tools, CI/CD , reporting, easy to learn & simple to use and many more. Hence automation team can choose best tool that matches their requirement.

Overall, looking at the unique features of Protractor and Ranorex definitely, these two sets its own image in this Selenium dominated world of test automation.

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According to the World Quality Report 2018–2019, test automation services will be the biggest bottleneck to deliver “Quality at Speed,” as it is a facilitator of successful Agile and DevOps implementation. 

Software testing cannot be appreciated without good tools since they determine how test automation is performed.

With AI and ML coming into the picture, the current generation tools are offering advanced capabilities, intelligent test execution and comprehensive reporting.

Keeping these factors in mind, let’s look at some of the go to tools in the market.

Below are some of the most widely used software testing tools listed in no particular order.

1. Selenium

Selenium is one of the oldest and most popular tools in Test Automation. It is the go-to tool for web application testing and a great tool for frequent regression testing.

Selenium Webdriver, a web automation framework, can be used to execute powerful browser-based regression automation tests.

Many organizations prefer Selenium because the tool is compatible with various programming languages and can be integrated with testing frameworks.

What makes this superior over others is, it is open-source and can be easily integrated with other tools and frameworks.

2. UFT/QTP

Unified Functional Test (UFT), formerly known as Quick Test Professional (QTP), is a leading cross-platform test automation tool.  

UFT provides regression and functional test automation for software applications and environments.

It can be used to automate Desktop, Mobile, Web, Net, SAP, ActiveX, Flex, Delphi, Java, Oracle, Visual Basic, PowerBuilder, PeopleSoft, Siebel, Stingray and many other applications.

UFT is a preferred tool because of its distinguishing features such as Keyword driven framework, Business Process Testing, Robust checkpoints, XML support and test results.

3. Katalon Studio

Katalon Studio is another popular open-source test automation tool for web and mobile environment.

Katalon works on top of Appium and Selenium, thus enhancing the features of those tools like user-friendly IDE, object repository, object spy & browser plugin.

It can also be integrated with other tools like qTest, Kobiton, Jira, Git, Slack, and many more.

Katalon Studio comes with a free version and paid option for businesses and enterprises support services.

4. SilkTest

Silk Testis a test automation tool from Microfocus used for automated Functional and Regression testing.

It is known for its speedy, efficient and high-quality test automation. It supports cross-browser testing and mobile testing.  

The key feature of SilkTest is, it provides Collaborative test design environment via Keyword driven testing.

5. Squish

Squish has become the latest sensation in Test Automation.

It is the number one choice for organizations when it comes to GUI Test Automation worldwide.

This commercial GUI and Regression testing tool is known for its powerful IDE and comprehensive support for major GUI technologies.

Squish is a 100% cross-platform tool with full support for all mobile, desktop, web and embedded platforms.

6. TestComplete

TestComplete is a functional test automation platform developed by SmartBear.

TestComplete gives software testers the ability to create automated tests for Web, Microsoft Windows, iOS and Android applications. SmartBear claims TestComplete to be the easiest to use when it comes to automated UI testing.

The highlight of this tool is that it can execute parallel regression tests with automation builds and create stable regression tests.

It can automatically schedule and run regression tests without human intervention. It also cuts down the testing time and training costs significantly.

7. Ranorex

Ranorex is an all-in-one GUI test automation tool from Ranorex Studio. Ranorex is used for end-to-end testing on mobile, desktop and web application.

The smart object recognition feature, which can automatically detect any change in UI is the standout feature of this tool.

Other prominent features include early bug finding, reusable code modules, easy test recording, seamless integration with other tools, and easy to use the editor.

It has a robust reporting feature and it is easy to use for beginners with a codeless click and go feature. It is also used for cross-browser testing.

8. Appium

Appium is another popular open-source mobile test automation tool for all native, hybrid and mobile web apps for iOS and Android.

Appium is a great choice for test automation framework as it can be used for all these different app /web types.

It is considered as best mobile test automation tool in the market right now. It is customizable and can be used according to our requirement.

9. SoapUI

As the name indicates, SoapUI is a widely used open-source test automation tool for SOAP and REST APIs.

SoapUI is a functional testing tool explicitly designed for API testing by SmartBear. It is known for its asynchronous testing, reusable scripts and powerful data-driven testing.

The tool comes with an open-source and premium version. The premium version has some advanced features like SQL query builder, assertion wizard and form editor.

10. EggPlant

EggPlant is a black-box GUI test automation tool. For software testers, Eggplant offers an assortment of test automation tools utilizing which you can perform various types of testing.

There is EggPlant Functional for functional testing and EggPlant Performance for load, stress and performance testing.

It can also be easily integrated with popular test management tools. With a single test script, EggPlant can create multiple device scenarios.

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