5 Best Automation Testing Tools for DevOps and Continuous Integration

With a boost in the popularity of agile testing, DevOps, Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Development (CD) process, the software testing industry is witnessing a change in outlook. Test automation tools and automation testing companies are in high demand as the time to perform the testing activities is shrinking rapidly. The automation testing tools not only provide intelligent automation solutions but also offer intelligent reporting to address most software testing challenges. Here is a rundown of best 5 software testing automation tools and automation frameworks that can greatly enhance your product testing results significantly.

1. Selenium

Selenium is widely popular and generally used for rapid cross-browser testing and for web-browser software test automation. This tool requires the automation test engineers to must have moderate to advanced programming skills. Such programming knowledge is required for creating complex and advanced Selenium test scripts. These scripting skills are also required to build test automation frameworks and libraries for specific browser testing requirements. Selenium is an open source testing automation tool. Selenium is widely used by programmers and test engineers (SDETs) who are knowledgeable with programming languages, for example, Java, C#, Perl, Python, Scala, Groovy, PHP & Ruby.

Selenium is powered with an incredible Selenium WebDriver that enables you to create browser-based regression test automation suites and test scripts. One of the key benefits of using Selenium  is that it enables you to scale and execute test scripts across many environments.

2. IBM Rational Functional Tester (RFT)

RFT is another popular and widely used test automation tool. It is a perfect tool of choice for Functional, API, Performance Testing and Regression testing requirements.

Rational Functional Tester supports creation of rapid automated functional tests by leveraging record and playback feature. It then compares the actual test result at the time of execution with the expected test result captured at the time of test recording.

IBM supports a plethora of applications and provides integrations with several other popular tools along with its own Rational Performance Tester (RPT), IBM Rational Quality Manager (RQM), etc. These family of tools support automated regression testing at the underlying API level, at the user-facing interface level, and also at the overall system level. This helps achieve the goals of end-to-end testing within the DevOps or continuous delivery (CD) pipeline.

3. UFT

Unified Functional Test is another widely used cross-platform testing automation tools. It offers the execution of automated tests using keywords as well as manual scripting. UFT also supports easy integration with various popular continuous integration (CI) tools, while offering excellent web, mobile, and API testing capabilities. UFT also has a smart object recognition function that comes very handy for test engineers.

As far as programming knowledge is concerned, UFT uses VBScript as the scripting language. It has pre-built reusable test libraries and test components. This reduces redundancy in test script creation, easy conversion of manual test cases to automated test scripts and an excellent shift-left compliance.

4. TestComplete

TestComplete is another very popular test automation tool that lets you to create and execute functional UI tests. As the name suggests, this automation testing tool is very well suited to perform automated testing of desktop, mobile, as well as web applications.

TestComplete lets you write automated tests in many popular programming languages such as Python, JavaScript, and VBScript, etc. TestComplete also supports recording and replaying tests.  This tool offers excellent GUI UI object recognition capabilities and is capable of detecting and updating UI objects automatically when they change. This ability helps in reducing the efforts required on part of the automation engineers to maintain test scripts, especially in a rapidly changing product. TestComplete offers easy scaling of tests across 1500+ real test environments and hence provides complete test coverage.

5. Cucumber

Cucumber is a automation testing tool that uses Behavior Driven Development (BDD) framework. This allows functional test automation in an easily understandable and readable format. This helps to test the application as a whole system rather than testing a particular piece of module.

Cucumber is free, open-source and available on any platform. This tool is very useful for writing automated acceptance tests for web applications. In the early days, Cucumber only supported Ruby language but now it is available with Java framework too.  Cucumber supports languages such as Perl, PHP, Python, Net as well.

Conclusion

These are some of the best automated software testing tools available today in the market that help with DevOps, agile testing and CI / CD process. Choosing the right software testing tool is important for your team’s success. However, since each of these automation testing tools require some degree of expertise and knowledge of programming languages, you may also consider hiring some of the leading software testing companies for your automation testing needs.