It is a fact that test automation shortens development cycles, avoids cumbersome repetitive tasks and create repeatable, reusable test scenarios that can be executed as often as needed to improve software quality. The first step is to identify the right test automation tool that fits your overall requirements from a variety of options available in the market, both commercial and open source.
Selenium is the most popular choice in the open-source test automation space, consisting of many tools and plugins for web application testing. Organizations that decide to use Selenium however, will need to invest in resources that have very good programming skills and experience to setup and integrate Selenium with other tools and frameworks. They will also need to invest to a team of developers to tackle any security threats during the software development and after it's released.
Another important is that support for Selenium is done by way of communities. This means that any issues may not be addressed in the next release cycle like any other commercial vendors do routinely. So it can potentially leave organizations themselves to find a solution on their own and contribute to community or wait for someone to give a solution.
Other common challenges faced with Selenium are:
- Dealing with pop-up windows and alert popups
- Testing dynamic text or content
- Capturing screen shots, either to file or in some form of report
- Iteration of the test case, running it repeatedly with some minor change
- Data Driven Testing, using suites of pre-cooked data or generating it on the fly
- Generating useful test status reports
- Users need to install updates manually, and projects often make it possible to download several different versions of the same applications, resulting in using several different versions of the same tools. This causes compatibility problems, confusion and poor performance.
- Difficult to keep track of what is happening with the code and to ensure that the level of quality and governance remains high.
- Even though free open-source tools reduce the licensing costs, you will end up spending significant efforts and money on learning, training and maintaining them.
- Compatibility issues with newer versions of browsers (IE & Firefox) and latest server versions
- Lacking robustness and stability
- Integrate API (REST/ SOAP) testing support
- Switching between windows
- Working with frames.
- Field validation
- How to identify dynamic objects.
- Xpath and CSS locators for identifying elements.
Automation and Maintenance
Continuous Testing Capabilities
Validata’s Quality Suite for Continuous Testing can help you connect testing with development and operations, and automate the design, development, quality assurance and deployment of new applications and systems, achieving automation levels of over 90%.
It operates through a unique model-based test automation approach which enables the automatic generation of test cases and eliminates the high maintenance costs of traditional script-based test automation, while predicting delivery, managing risks and costs and driving operational efficiencies and agility. It aligns testing to business processes and requirements while improving productivity and automation coverage, achieving reduced test cycle times in all phases of testing and enhanced ROI.
At the end of the day it is as simple between buying a branded car and assembling a car on your own. Branded car has its cost & services attached whereas in assembled car, you need to take care of everything on your own.
Tagged under