Test automation tools
You have already defined your strategy for test automation, you’ve put practices in place to build a culture that supports your strategy.
You’ve reviewed key concepts on building reliable tests as well as making sure your application can be automated against.
Now is the time to consider the tools for your test automation project.
Choose the right tools for your initiative.
Before choosing your tools it’s important to consider who will be using them. If you don’t have programmers who will actively contribute to the test automation then building your own test automation framework may not be a valuable option.
Remember test automation is software development, if your idea is that you’ll have your testers learn how to code and then create this brand-new software development project please realize that this takes quite a bit of investment in education for them.
Your organization should provide a massive amount of support for this, if that seems unrealistic there are tools on the market which allow your testers to record their scenarios and then execute them as part of regression testing.
While programming knowledge is not required note that you’ll still need to plan for triaging and maintenance.
If you’ll have your developers or your automation engineers do the automating then a coded solution is by far a better option.
It allows for more control and flexibility, the bare minimum you need for your test automation project is an interaction tool and a validation tool.
Interaction tools
Remember we have three levels:
Unit tests
Unit tests and service tests that call production functions should be written in the same programming language and reside in the same project as the production code. Execution is simply the call to these functions. For other tests you have more options.
Service tests
Service level tests that call into api’s will need to be able to execute the HTTP calls and read through the responses so you’ll want to look for a programming language that makes this easy or libraries that take care of the boilerplate work for you.
UI tests
For you UI you’ll need a navigation library which provides the ability to interact with HTML elements of your application. Using a tool that supports the programming language that your application is written in is a reasonable idea. However you should also consider how easy it is to hire for that programming language , in case you want to expand and hire more additional automation engineers ,and also consider how widely supported that programming language is by test automation tools.
It’s really beneficial to use tools that have an abundance of support and educational resources so if your team is using an obscure programming language for its product development which has limited support and resources this might not be the best choice for your automation project.
Another factor to consider is the browsers and devices you need to run your test automation against and ensure that the tools you choose are supported for these options.
Validation tools
Let’s move on to what is needed beyond interaction tools. You also need to include validation libraries, these are tools which will allow you to turn your code into a test which can pass or fail.
There are various options of these validation libraries for the array of things that you need to verify, including functional, visual, accessibility, security and so on.
Conclusion
This is the bare minimum that you’ll need for your automation project:
- A way to execute the test
- A way to verify them
However you can certainly make your project more sophisticated by adding a reporting library, which shows screenshots and possibly even video of test failures or the integration gherkin scenario files if your team is already practicing behavior driven development and if your ultimate goal is to run the test as part of CI you’ll want to choose tools that allow for this integration.