Testing is extremely crucial in producing a good quality final application. Developers and quality assurance experts need to test the newly built application before deploying it for distribution. Therefore advancing with the technology, the development teams are running to accelerate application quality and time-to-market.
Because manual testing as the name suggests solely depends on human input and evaluation of the features and functionalities for quality assurance. It’s a user-centered approach, in which testers monitor the application’s performance and identify whether it meets the user’s requirements and expectations. All these are done manually. Doing this repeatedly for larger test cases can be a tedious and time-consuming process.
While automation testing is a method of writing and executing test cases on an application using automation tools. Through the automated testing approach, testers can ideally have as many test plans for mobile applications as possible. Automation testing techniques usually compare the obtained results with predicted outcomes. Additionally, it facilitates both functional and non-functional testing.
Having said that does not mean that automated testing replaces manual testing instead it should be a part of the plan. Both methods of testing have their own benefits. There is no doubt saying that automation testing makes tester’s jobs easier by relieving them of tedious and repetitive work. It also improves the efficiency of the overall development of applications and reduces room for the risk of human error.
However, in some situations manual testing is unavoidable. But in order to achieve the highest quality for the application, test automation comes in quite handy with higher accuracy rates.
In this article, we will focus on automation testing. We will start with what automation truly means, why it is important and the various automation testing tools to use in 2023 that can prove to be extremely helpful. Let’s get started and explore them now.
What is Automation
Automation means using modern technology to do activities with less human intervention and less tiring. Automation can be put to use in any organization that has repetitive and monotonous operations. Automation in application testing refers to the process of developing applications to replace manual and repeated operations. It improves the speed by automating manual operations that previously required human intervention.
Automation is a strong tool that helps an organization to scale more quickly with fewer faults, save money, and free up team members from tedious administrative tasks to focus on strategic tasks. It is an essential method to deliver applications with enhanced speed, consistency, and security. Specifically with the rise of virtualized networks and cloud services that require rapid, sophisticated deployment.
What Are Test Automation Tools
Test automation tools offer an easy and sustainable way to automate web, mobile, and API testing. By automating all aspects of the quality lifecycle, from test design to code deployment, the test automation tools drive better test efficiency, scalability, and security.
These tools help to automate several aspects of application testing by reducing the need for human intervention and driving greater speed, reliability, and efficiency. By enabling manual testers and business analysts to automate core testing activities, utilizing these tools makes early in-sprint automation easier while integrating seamlessly within the current ecosystem. Automation testing tools allow for developing test suites, running test cases, and analyzing test results in an accelerated manner.
Automation testing tools help to meet automation testing objectives flawlessly. From desktop application testing, web app testing, cross-browser testing, regression testing, mobile app testing, API testing, security testing, load testing, and more.
Benefits of Test Automation Tools
Test automation tools guarantee quality at reduced speed and cost which helps the team to bring applications into the market quickly. In contrast to manual testing tools, which require continuous physical effort, test automation tools eliminate the need for physical intervention. This allows the testers to test new features and changes quickly and seamlessly. Automation tools benefit teams in many ways.
- Minimizes test time and releases high-quality applications.
- Overall applications development efficiency and productivity get Improved.
- Reduce the chance and impact of manual errors and mistakes.
- Incorporate new changes quickly and easily and minimizes the feedback cycle.
- Need fewer resources for testing, hence cutting down on expenses.
- Achieve higher test coverage while allowing teams to focus on other important tasks that need human attention.
- Allows reusing the test cases while also detecting critical insights into the testing process.
Now, the question is when do we need to use automation in application testing?
Need for automation
Automation can be used in application testing under the following conditions:
- When the frequency of carrying out certain tests is extremely high and repetitive, automating them can save a significant amount of time.
- Automation testing can be used when the number of test cases is exceedingly large, and testing them each manually can get extremely tedious.
- When the same set of tests needs to be conducted in multiple environments, then, automation testing is much more efficient.
- When there is a task of testing the same or single feature or functionality with different inputs of data sets automation can do the task quicker.
- When there is a need for regression testing. That means testing to make sure that the addition, deletion, or change in a code doesn’t impact the way the rest of the application or the existing features work. Regression testing needs to be performed after every cycle of editing. If this is automated, the entire testing
Top 11 Test Automation Tools to use in 2023
Now that we know about Automation Testing let us move on to automation testing tools. The automation testing tools list here covers both web automation testing tools, as well as mobile automation testing tools, and the process will be so much easier.
LambdaTest
LambdaTest is a cloud-based cross-browser compatibility testing tool that can be used to assess manual and automated browser compatibility. LambdaTest enables users to conduct a variety of tests in the cloud to identify potential bugs or faults that would otherwise be impossible to detect, early in the development process, before anything goes into production.LambdaTest offers more robust options than most other automated testing solutions.
LambdaTest has the capability to run automated Selenium scripts on a scalable cloud grid. Live browser testing, parallel testing, resolution display testing, automated Screenshot testing. Geo-Targeting and Geo Localization across various countries, and multiple browser support are some of its important features.
LambdaTest allows the user to test their public or private websites and web apps, and to perform interactive live testing on a cloud of more than 3000 real devices, a variety of desktop browsers, and operating systems combinations. Users can also utilize LambdaTest to create full-page screenshots of websites across a variety of devices, operating systems, browsers, and resolutions.
Using this platform users can test how their web app looks on different devices and at different resolutions. Visual layout testing is also possible, which allows the users to compare many picture layouts and identify design variations. It can also be seamlessly integrated with Jira, Trello, and Slack to support bug-recording functionality. It offers continuous Integration Tools and APIs for Continuous Testing. Continuous collaboration while testing is an added bonus.
Selenium
Selenium is a testing framework to perform web application automation testing. It offers an array of different capabilities for test automation which is why it is a much-in-demand tool. The popularity of this automated website testing tool comes from its ability to support various browsers (Chrome, Firefox, IE, and Headless browsers) and platforms (Windows, Mac, and Linux). It also offers testers the ability to write test scripts in multiple programming languages Java, PHP, C#, Python, Groovy, Ruby, and Perl.
What makes Selenium an even more popular browser automation tool is the fact that most major SaaS-based cross-browser testing vendors like LambdaTest, SauceLabs, etc provide support for Selenium for browser testing automation.
The Selenium IDE provides an Integrated Development Environment for running simple and reliable end-to-end tests. allows developers to easily record, edit, and debug tests. Its record and playback feature allows developers to automatically capture their interactions with the browser or website so that they may produce, develop, and maintain tests.
Selenium WebDriver allows the creation of robust, browser-based regression automation suites and tests. additionally, it lets you scale and distribute scripts across the environment of your choice.
Appium
In recent years, Appium has quickly emerged as one of the most widely used platforms for quick and easy automated testing of native, hybrid, and mobile web apps along with cross-platform testing. It works seamlessly across iOS, Android, and Windows app testing and doesn’t require an SDK or recompilation.
one of the reasons for its popularity is that it provide supports various programming languages or test frameworks including PHP, Ruby, JavaScript, Python, C#, etc, and provides multi-platform support.
Allows testers to automate mobile apps from any programming language. This enables developers to utilize their favorite dev tools, Driving Android, iOS, and Windows app testing using the WebDriver protocol. Appium delivers high performance, optimized stability, and maximizes flexibility for mobile-based testing.
This allows the testers to use the Appium test automation tool to write test cases with any programming language of their choice. And allows reusing the same code across multiple platforms, including iOS, Android, and Windows. The parallel execution of test scripts in Appium saves a significant amount of time and work consumed in the testing process.
Kobiton
Kobiton helps developers and testers test and deliver mobile apps faster, with scriptless automation abilities. It also offers seamless CI/CD integrations, in-depth session exploration, and reporting features.
For testers who need fast, easy, and hassle-free mobile application testing solutions, then Kobiton can be helpful. Simplifying the testing process speeds up the development and delivery of mobile apps. It offers a variety of features and capabilities to mobile app developers, including manual, automated, and parallel testing on real mobile devices, testing apps on numerous devices, and testing apps in the cloud, on-premise, and hybrid settings.
The best thing about Kobiton is that it allows testers to test the code on real mobile devices and the most up-to-date platforms, resulting in superior results and actionable insights based on real user experience. It allows the users to resolve test failures with maximum accuracy and efficiency so that they can release the app more quickly.
Katalon Studio
Katalon Studio is a powerful all-in-one test automation solution that supports web and mobile app development environments and provides hassle-free deployment and fast results. It is built on top of the open-source automation frameworks of Selenium and Appium and provides options of record and playback, along with built-in templates for maintaining object repositories, custom keywords, and test cases.
Automated UI test scripts in Katalon can be created and reused without coding, as a result, testers with low technical understanding can use a user interface.
Katalon uses Groovy (Java) scripting language. This tool is simple to set up and comes with a number of pre-installed templates for repeating certain testing patterns.
Cypress
Cypress is an open-source Javascript-based front-end testing tool that offers fast, easy, reliable, and consistent testing for any application that runs in a browser It is a developer-friendly tool that Offers a complete end-to-end testing experience, Cypress makes it easy to set up and run automation tests without any dependencies, changes to code, or additional downloads. Cypress can be used for cross-browser testing as it uses a technique that operates directly in the browser.
In short, Cypress lets the testers quickly write and execute test cases in real time. Automatic capturing of screenshots and videos of issues found, and debugging capabilities using parallelization and load balancing, are some of its features.
Cucumber
Cucumber is a behavior-driven development (BDD) application testing tool with Gherkin. It provides end-to-end test frameworks and focuses on end-user experience and bridges the communication between technical and business associates by collaborating on executable specifications. Regardless of technical knowledge and experience, testers without in-depth coding knowledge can also script using cucumber because its code is scripted in simple plain English text (Gherkin). Also, its test script architecture allows the reuse of code.
This open-source tool supports various programming languages Java, Ruby, Groovy, and Scala. It is flexible and can be executed with different platforms like selenium, Ruby, and other supported frameworks. Cucumber is a tool for writing web application acceptance tests hence only supports the web environment.
TestComplete
TestComplete, by SmartBear Software, is a fully functional automated testing platform offering various automated testing solutions for desktop, web, and mobile applications. testers can use TestComplete with various scripting languages such as JavaScript, Python, VBScript, JScript, C++Script, and C#Script. This tool offers other advanced features like a test visualizer, test recording and playback, GUI object recognition, parallel and keyword-driven testing, the reuse of automated tests, and many more.
We expect TestComplete to continue to be on the list of popular test automation tools this year too; thanks to its powerful and comprehensive set of features.
Watir
Watir, or Web Application Testing in Ruby (a full-featured modern scripting language). It is an open-sourced tool of Ruby libraries. It is a very lightweight application that provides support for multiple browsers including Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Opera on various platforms, and also supports cloud execution. Watir can manipulate browsers just like humans do. It supports any application, irrespective of the technology it was created in. In Windows, it only works with Internet Explorer.
Ranorex Studio
Ranorex Studio is an all-in-one automation tool, with solutions for a variety of settings, devices, and applications, allowing automated testing of any desktop, online, or mobile application. Regardless of your programming experience, Ranorex is a suitable test automation tool for both beginners and experts, for creating tests for a variety of platforms. Its ability to run tests locally or remotely on real mobile devices, simulators, or emulators adds to its value. As a result, you will be able to evaluate your program thoroughly.
Ranorex also allows you to perform parallel tests in many browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Microsoft Edge, and others to speed up the testing step and achieve the objectives more quickly.
Conclusion
Organizations embrace modern test automation tools to minimize errors, maximize test coverage, drive code reusability, and improve testing outcomes. The above-mentioned tools offer advanced test automation capabilities to enable smart test management across browsers, devices, and platforms.
In conclusion, it can be said that adopting one of these tools in 2023 and beyond can truly transform your testing outcomes.