Web Automation Testing Tools

Web Automation

The most commonly used form of automated testing is web automation. The purpose of web automation is to interact with a web page in the same manor as a user would, in order to test user scenarios quickly and consecutively. It is important when choosing an automation framework to ensure it can complete the steps in your test cases. Some of the most commonly used frameworks and tools are:

Selenium Webdriver

• • This web driver allows cross-browser interaction with the elements on a page and can do most of the tasks a user can do, it is the most used framework due to it being open source and very simple to set up and use. Although it does have slight issues with certain steps, where it can fail for no reason on random runs.

  • Here are some wrappers built upon Selenium WebDriver:

    • WebDriverIO

    • CodeceptJS

    • Robot Framework

  • This solution is free.

  • Can be found at https://www.selenium.dev/documentation/en/webdriver/

Katalon Studio

• • This tool is an testing solution that builds upon selenium, giving it a visual way of designing and developing test scripts. It is extremely easy to use and beginners are able to pick this up without any coding knowledge. The draw back is that it can be quite heavy to use as it will take more resources to run than selenium. This can mean that larger test suites will become a struggle as they expand.

  • The solution is free, but has a licensed option with more features.

  • Can be found at https://www.katalon.com/

TestComplete

• • This product by SmartBear allows test scripts to be written in multiple languages such as JavaScript, Python or C++. TestComplete has the added benefit of having an object recognition engine, which allows you input images of a button and have the test engine detect that button on the page and allow you to click it. This allows you to create different types of test cases which look for types of objects visually as oppose to ID’s or CSS selectors, which are commonly used by Selenium.

  • This tool is licensed.

  • Can be found at https://smartbear.com/product/testcomplete/overview/

Playwright

• • This is a Microsoft product developed by the team who created Puppeteer. Intended to be an alternative to Selenium, Playwright helps to overcome some of the instability issues within Selenium. Playwright is a web driver that allows cross-browser interaction with elements within the browser. It is in it’s early stages at the moment but shows great potential.

  • This solution is free.

  • Can be found at https://github.com/microsoft/playwright