Increased demand for system automation is observed in all spheres of human activity, including the IT industry. The last one actively uses functional testing automation, which simplifies the web applications development, software testing, and communication with staff.
In particular, organizations are working hard to improve integration methodologies. But most importantly, the central aspect of test automation has changed today: they focused on the improved coverage and effective use of test cases.
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Why automated testing?
The advantages of functional testing automation are apparent: and it lies in the time savings. It’s enough to say that manual testing takes much time and resources when automatic testing requires just writing one script. However, this same advantage makes it possible to reuse this script, which optimizes the process significantly.
Selenium
This tool is known as one of the most popular functional testing tools for web applications. Moreover, it takes top place in the list of the most important and demanded tools for automation testing.
Selenium is considered the ancestor of several other testing tools, including Robot Framework, Watir, Protractor, Katalon Studio. The coders can write scripts for the framework on Python, C#, PHP, Java, and others.
Selenium is flexible enough and supports Linux, Windows Mac, and many popular browsers, including Firefox, Headless browsers, IE, Chrome.
The main Selenium properties are:
- Create complex and advanced automation scripts.
- Creation of a base that will also be available for other automated testing tools.
- Parallel execution of the test with an accompanying reduction in time.
As for the disadvantages, this is the need for a highly qualified specialist. Thus, an automation tester must have advanced knowledge in software development and be ready for the time-consuming writing of special libraries and frames that provide the necessary functions in the process of automated testing.
Appium
Initially, Sauce Labs developed a cross-platform open-source tool to automate their native mobile apps. It’s known that this is one of the most demanded frameworks which allows testing several devices at once. Moreover, it is used for different web apps, including native and hybrid ones. And if just a few updates ago Appium supported web apps only, then now it is suitable for desktop apps.
As for Appium features and advantages, then they are as follows:
- Open-source.
- Strong community.
- Multi-platform support.
- Parallel testing.
- Support for many programming languages, including
- Python, PHP, Ruby, C #, Java and JavaScript, etc.
- Selenium client library support.
Also, you should consider a couple of nuances, like a little slow work due to its dependence on the remote web driver and some difficulties with parallel testing on Mac devices.
Cypress
Many experts argue that it’s not easy to find a simpler functional automated testing tool than Cypress. It has extensive documentation written in simple language and provides API descriptions, helpful guides from the developer project, and configuration settings.
In addition, the tool also boasts excellent documentation and a number of advantages:
- Easy to install and fast.
- Test runner, which is an excellent tool for the debugging process.
- Great development experience.
It is also worth noting that this is an ideal framework for those who are just trying their hand at test automation. But, of course, it has its drawbacks, such as the problem with submitting the form data and the cross-origin error. Cypress also does not allow you to run tests in several tabs at the same time and switch to other resources.
Playwright
This is another worthy alternative for Microsoft’s Selenium. It allows you to test not only in JavaScript but also in Python and C #. Again, it’s open-source and great for end-to-end testing.
The features and advantages are following:
- Single API.
- High speed.
- Wide coverage.
- Excellent accuracy.
- No restrictions on iFrame, Cross-Origin.
- Ability to upload and download files.
- Generating and writing scripts through CodeGen.
- Allure Report feature integration.
- Support for Java and JavaScript, Python, .NET, and more.
- Ability to write cross-browser tests.
Safari testing is also characteristic of the Playwright. Automation is also possible here for single-page applications that rely on a modern web platform.
So, the tool offers quite wide opportunities, adding new features for testing.
Mocha
Mocha was originally developed for Node.js in 2011. It is now a popular functional testing automation tool that can also be used in front-end testing.
- Flexibility.
- Lots of tools and features.
- An active community that will always support and advise.
- Ability to select libraries, assertion, mocking, and spy libraries you want to use.
- Powerful open-source libraries like Chai and Sinon.
Mocha is a great tool for those who have a large project and need additional settings and configurations.
Jest
Two functional automation testing tools are quite often opposed to each other: these are Mocha and Jest. In this case, this is a framework that was created for Java Testing script and allowed simultaneous testing.
It is also worthy for several reasons:
- Excellent documentation with lots of examples supported by the community.
- A friendly, helpful community that provides advice via Discord or Stack Overflow.
- Isolation of tests.
- Extensive API.
- Interactive mode for easy running of all necessary tests.
- Easy mocking.
- Snapshot testing.
And what’s nicer, it works right out of the box; that is, it does not require any additional settings. It’s easy to stop and control.
Robot Framework
It is a keyword-driven framework explicitly designed for test automation. It is written in Python, but it is usually enough for writing tests to use ready-made keywords embedded in this framework without resorting to programming in Python.
You just need to load the necessary libraries, such as Selenium Library, and write a test.
It also has many significant advantages, namely:
- Low entry threshold.
- The ability to set tags for tests.
- Automatic reports creation.
- Parallel launch.
- BDD out of the box.
Of the minuses, we can single out poor third-party libraries’ support or, for example, the absence of the possibility of debugging with built-in tools.
TestNG
Cédric Beust has created a framework that will become the Next Generation of functional automation testing tools. TestNG is what will help make your tests more structured and provide better validation points.
It is also remarkable in the following points:
- Powerful and varied annotations to support your test cases.
- Parallel execution of tests, use of dependencies between tests.
- Flexibility to run your tests on different datasets, through the TestNG.xml file or through the data-provider concept.
- Grouping and prioritizing test cases.
- Generation of HTML reports, customization using various plugins.
- Generation of test execution logs.
- Easy integration with Eclipse, Maven, Jenkins, etc.
In essence, it is an annotation-based testing framework that overcomes some of the shortcomings of JUnit by adding features like flexible devices, test classification, parameter testing, and dependent methods.
Selenide
In short, Selenide is a tool for automating user actions in a browser, focused on the convenience and ease of implementation of business logic in autotests in the user’s language.
Its key features are:
- Concise jQuery-style syntax.
- Automatically resolve most Ajax, wait and timeout issues.
- Browser life management.
- Automatic screenshots.
Selenide’s goal is to focus on the business logic of tests and not waste mental energy on technical details.
Cucumber
Cucumber is a free, flexible, and functional BDD tool that is open source. It applies to functional testing tools for web applications only.
It is built with simple test code (Gherkin) and compatible with different frameworks like Selenium or Ruby. This functional automated testing tool is in demand by serious users such as PayPal and Canon.
Functional Testing Tools for Automation Testing: Final thoughts
We all understand that there are no perfect functional automation testing tools. However, we have many tools today to speed up testing without hours of tedious work.
The IT industry offers dozens of functional automation tools; some of them are considered as best ones:
- Selenium;
- Appium;
- Cypress;
- Playwright;
- Mocha;
- Jest;
- Robot Framework;
- TestNG;
- Selenide;
- Cucumber.
Many of them are open source, compatible with a lot of programming languages and applications.
But for your business processes to be optimized in the right way, you also need a team of experienced specialists and testers that know how to use functional automation tools correctly. And we will help you solve all the tasks related to testing, automation, and optimization of business processes at once.
