(chair) Abstract The aim of this research paper is to evaluate and compare three automated software testing tools to determine their usability and effectiveness. Software testing is a crucial part of software development and the process of automating software testing is vital to its success. Currently, complex systems are being built and testing throughout the software development cycle is pertinent to the success of the software. To enable comparison of the automated testing tools, a multi-partitioned metric suite was developed to guide the tool evaluation process. A selected web application was first manually tested; then tested using the three automated testing tools.
Automated testing included the development of scripts that not only saves time and resources when applications are updated, but also speeds up the process of testing when regression testing is necessary. An important contribution of this research is the development of the metric suite that facilitates comparison and selection of a desired testing tool for automated testing. Inferences, implications and results are presented and discussed. (pdf) Recommended Citation: Bordelon, N., Simmonds, D, Reinicke, B., Patterson, L., Noble, J. (2012) A Comparison of Automated Software Testing Tools. Annals of the Master of Science in Computer Science and Information Systems at UNC Wilmington, 6(1) paper 1.
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( February 2009) In, test automation is the use of special (separate from the software being tested) to control the execution of tests and the comparison of actual outcomes with predicted outcomes. Test automation can automate some repetitive but necessary tasks in a formalized testing process already in place, or perform additional testing that would be difficult to do manually.
Test automation is critical for. Contents. Overview Some tasks, such as extensive low-level interface, can be laborious and time-consuming to do manually. In addition, a manual approach might not always be effective in finding certain classes of defects. Test automation offers a possibility to perform these types of testing effectively.
Once automated tests have been developed, they can be run quickly and repeatedly. Many times, this can be a cost-effective method for regression testing of software products that have a long maintenance life. Even minor patches over the lifetime of the application can cause existing features to break which were working at an earlier point in time.
There are many approaches to test automation, however below are the general approaches used widely:. A testing framework that generates events such as keystrokes and mouse clicks, and observes the changes that result in the user interface, to validate that the observable behavior of the program is correct. A testing framework that uses a programming interface to the application to validate the behaviour under test. Typically API driven testing bypasses application user interface altogether. It can also be testing to classes, modules or libraries are tested with a variety of input arguments to validate that the results that are returned are correct.
Test automation tools can be expensive, and are usually employed in combination with manual testing. Test automation can be made cost-effective in the long term, especially when used repeatedly in. A good candidate for test automation is a test case for common flow of an application, as it is required to be executed (regression testing) every time an enhancement is made in the application.
Test automation reduces the effort associated with manual testing. Manual effort is needed to develop and maintain automated checks, as well as reviewing test results. In automated testing the test engineer or person must have software coding ability, since the test cases are written in the form of source code which, when run, produce output according to the that are a part of it. Some test automation tools allow for test authoring to be done by keywords instead of coding, which do not require programming. One way to generate test cases automatically is through use of a model of the system for test case generation, but research continues into a variety of alternative methodologies for doing so.
In some cases, the model-based approach enables non-technical users to create automated business test cases in plain English so that no programming of any kind is needed in order to configure them for multiple operating systems, browsers, and smart devices. What to automate, when to automate, or even whether one really needs automation are crucial decisions which the testing (or development) team must make. A multi-vocal literature review of 52 practitioner and 26 academic sources found that five main factors to consider in test automation decision are: 1) System Under Test (SUT), 2) the types and numbers of tests, 3) test-tool, 4) human and organizational topics, and 5) cross-cutting factors. The most frequent individual factors identified in the study were: need for regression testing, economic factors, and maturity of SUT. Unit testing A growing trend in software development is the use of frameworks such as the frameworks (for example, and ) that allow the execution of unit tests to determine whether various sections of the are acting as expected under various circumstances. Describe tests that need to be run on the program to verify that the program runs as expected.
Test automation mostly using unit testing is a key feature of and, where it is known as (TDD) or test-first development. Unit tests can be written to define the functionality before the code is written. However, these unit tests evolve and are extended as coding progresses, issues are discovered and the code is subjected to refactoring. Only when all the tests for all the demanded features pass is the code considered complete. Proponents argue that it produces software that is both more reliable and less costly than code that is tested by manual exploration. It is considered more reliable because the code coverage is better, and because it is run constantly during development rather than once at the end of a development cycle.
The developer discovers defects immediately upon making a change, when it is least expensive to fix. Finally, is safer when unit testing is used; transforming the code into a simpler form with less, but equivalent behavior, is much less likely to introduce new defects when the refactored code is covered by unit tests. Graphical User Interface (GUI) testing. Main article: Many test automation tools provide record and playback features that allow users to interactively record user actions and replay them back any number of times, comparing actual results to those expected. The advantage of this approach is that it requires little or no.
This approach can be applied to any application that has a. However, reliance on these features poses major reliability and maintainability problems. Relabelling a button or moving it to another part of the window may require the test to be re-recorded.
Record and playback also often adds irrelevant activities or incorrectly records some activities. A variation on this type of tool is for testing of web sites. Here, the 'interface' is the web page. However, such a framework utilizes entirely different techniques because it is rendering and listening to instead of operating system events.
Or solutions based on are normally used for this purpose. Another variation of this type of test automation tool is for testing mobile applications. This is very useful given the number of different sizes, resolutions, and operating systems used on mobile phones. For this variation, a framework is used in order to instantiate actions on the mobile device and to gather results of the actions. Another variation is script-less test automation that does not use record and playback, but instead builds a model of the application and then enables the tester to create test cases by simply inserting test parameters and conditions, which requires no scripting skills. API driven testing is also being widely used by software testers due to the difficulty of creating and maintaining GUI-based automation testing. It involves directly testing as part of, to determine if they meet expectations for functionality, reliability, performance, and security.
Since APIs lack a, API testing is performed at the. API testing is considered critical when an API serves as the primary interface to since can be difficult to maintain with the short release cycles and frequent changes commonly used with. Continuous testing is the process of executing automated tests as part of the software delivery pipeline to obtain immediate feedback on the business risks associated with a software release candidate. For Continuous Testing, the scope of testing extends from validating bottom-up requirements or user stories to assessing the system requirements associated with overarching business goals. What to test Testing tools can help automate tasks such as product installation, test data creation, GUI interaction, problem detection (consider parsing or polling agents equipped with ), defect logging, etc., without necessarily automating tests in an end-to-end fashion. One must keep satisfying popular requirements when thinking of test automation:. and independence.
Data driven capability (Input Data, Output Data, ). Customization Reporting (DB Access,. Easy debugging and logging. friendly – minimal binary files. Extensible & Customization (Open to be able to integrate with other tools). Common Driver (For example, in the Java development ecosystem, that means or and the popular ). This enables tests to integrate with the developers'.
Test Automation Tools Comparison Matrix
Support unattended test runs for integration with build processes and batch runs. Servers require this.
Email Notifications like. Support distributed execution environment (distributed ).
Distributed application support (distributed ) Framework approach in automation A test automation framework is an integrated system that sets the rules of automation of a specific product. This system integrates the function libraries, test data sources, object details and various reusable modules. These components act as small building blocks which need to be assembled to represent a business process. The framework provides the basis of test automation and simplifies the automation effort.
The main advantage of a of assumptions, concepts and tools that provide support for automated software testing is the low cost for. If there is change to any then only the test case file needs to be updated and the and will remain the same. Ideally, there is no need to update the scripts in case of changes to the application. Choosing the right framework/scripting technique helps in maintaining lower costs. The costs associated with test scripting are due to development and maintenance efforts. The approach of scripting used during test automation has effect on costs. Test Automation Interface Model Test Automation Interface consists of the following core modules:.
Interface Engine. Interface Environment. Object Repository Interface engine Interface engines are built on top of Interface Environment.
Interface engine consists of a and a test runner. The parser is present to parse the object files coming from the object repository into the test specific scripting language.
The test runner executes the test scripts using a. Object repository Object repositories are a collection of UI/Application object data recorded by the testing tool while exploring the application under test. Defining boundaries between automation framework and a testing tool Tools are specifically designed to target some particular test environment, such as Windows and web automation tools, etc. Tools serve as a driving agent for an automation process. However, an automation framework is not a tool to perform a specific task, but rather infrastructure that provides the solution where different tools can do their job in a unified manner. This provides a common platform for the automation engineer. There are various types of frameworks.
They are categorized on the basis of the automation component they leverage. These are:. Code-driven testing.
See also. Elfriede Dustin; et al. Automated Software Testing. Addison Wesley. Elfriede Dustin; et al. Implementing Automated Software Testing.
Addison Wesley. Mark Fewster & Dorothy Graham (1999). Software Test Automation. ACM Press/Addison-Wesley. Roman Savenkov: How to Become a Software Tester. Roman Savenkov Consulting, 2008,.
Hong Zhu; et al. Mosley, Daniel J.; Posey, Bruce (2002).
Just Enough Software Test Automation. Hayes, Linda G., 'Automated Testing Handbook', Software Testing Institute, 2nd Edition, March 2004. Kaner, Cem, ', August 2000 External links. by James Bach.
by Brian Marick. by Hans Buwalda. by Jeremy Carey-Dressler. by Joe Colantonio.