5 Best Automation Testing Tools to Speed up Testing

With an increase in the adoption of agile and DevOps methodologies, the software testing industry is undergoing a paradigm shift. Test automation is gaining traction as there is very less time left to perform testing.  The software automation testing tools not only provides intelligent automation but also provide smart analytics to address any testing challenges.

What is Automation Testing?

Automation testing is a method of software testing whereby an automation tool executes your specific test cases. This type of testing is used to compare the outcome of various test cases to their corresponding expected results. The automated software collects and compiles all of the data from the tests into detailed reports for the testers to analyze.

Testers can write their own test scripts or use a third-party automated testing tool to implement automation testing. This method of testing is used to conduct repetitive and tedious tests that are too time-consuming or difficult to perform manually.

Automation testing significantly improves testing efficiency and can help to find errors that would have taken the testers much longer to spot if they were testing the software manually. However, automation testing is not suitable for all types of test cases. Manual testing should still be implemented in addition to this method.

We have listed the top automation testing tools which are mostly used by QA professionals. Here is a list of top 5 automation testing tools and frameworks that can improve your software testing outcomes significantly.

5 Best Automation Testing Tools List:

1 – Selenium

Selenium is used for cross-browser testing and for web-browser test automation. To use this tool, the testers must have advanced programming skills for writing complex and advanced test scripts. These skills are required to build automation frameworks and libraries for specific testing needs. Selenium is an open source tool that is commonly used by developers and testers who are well versed with programming languages such as Java, C#, Perl, Python, Scala, Groovy, PHP & Ruby.

Selenium is equipped with a powerful Selenium WebDriver which allows you to create browser-based regression automation suites and tests. One of the key advantages of this tool is that it allows you to scale and distribute scripts across many environments.

2 – IBM Rational Functional Tester (RFT)

IBM RFT is well suited for regression and functional testing.  It is a data-driven testing platform that supports applications like .Net, Java, SAP, Flex, and Ajax.  The scripting languages used by RFT are .Net and Java. One of the unique features of IBM RFT is Storyboard testing which simplifies test visualization by recording and visualizing user actions with the help of application screenshots in a storyboard format. It also allows editing using natural language. It also offers integration with IBM Jazz application lifecycle management like IBM Rotational Team Concert and Rational Quality Manager.

3- Cucumber

Cucumber is a Behavior Driven Development (BDD) framework which allows functional validation in an easily understandable and readable format. BDD is an approach which is an extension of Test Driven Development and it is used to test the system as a whole rather than testing a particular piece of code.

Cucumber is a tool for working with the executable specifications. The executable specifications are used for greater collaboration among IT and business teams. This tool is useful for writing acceptance tests for the web application. Cucumber offers feature files that can be used as a go-to-documents by Business Analysts, Developers, and Testers, etc. Initially, Cucumber was implemented in Ruby language but later it was extended to the Java framework.  Cucumber supports languages such as Perl, PHP, Python, Net etc.

4 – TestComplete

TestComplete allows you to build and run functional UI tests. This is an automation testing tool that is well suited to test desktop, mobile, and web applications. The tool allows you to write test in most popular languages such as Python, JavaScript, and VBScript, etc.  It allows you to record and replay tests.  It offers GUI UI object recognition capabilities that detect and update UI objects automatically. It helps in reducing the efforts required to maintain test scripts. With TestComplete it is rather easy to scale tests across 1500+ real test environments to provide complete test coverage.

5 – eggPlant

One of the best automation testing tools for application and GUI testing is eggPlant. TestPlant developed eggPlant for testers to perform different types of testing. While most of the automation tool follows an object-based approach, eggPlant works on an image-based approach.  The tool allows testers to interact with the application the same way the end users will do. In eggPlant, you can use a single script to perform testing on many platforms such as Windows, Mac, Linux, and Solaris, etc.

eggPlant offers a suite of test automation tools to perform different types of testing. eggPlant functional testing tool is used for functional testing and eggPlant performance is used for performance, load and stress testing.

Summary

Each of the above-mentioned automation software testing tools offers some unique features that help to improve the quality of the released software.  You can choose any of these automation testing tools based on your project requirement.

Apart from these automation testing tools, you require the right test management tool to get the desired results from your software testing. ReQtest is a cloud-based test management tool that is preferred by the test leaders across the globe as it helps them to handle testing challenges and accomplish testing objectives easily.