4 Development Tools for Automation Testing Services
Manual and automated testing make a perfect pair, complementing each other to provide a thorough testing strategy that results in top-notch results. Manual testing, while thorough, isn’t necessary for all instances, and may stall the progress of launching your mobile app with testing bottlenecks. Automated testing services can propel the development lifecycle toward launch, especially if you’re automating the right tasks and relying on the right tools.
By leveraging the right blend of manual and automation testing services, your product undergoes a rigorous quality assurance process that is efficient, effective, and designed to help you achieve your goals. Automation is an asset to software testing because it reduces redundancy and offers:
- Higher testing speed
- Lower testing costs
- Greater testing accuracy
- Increased testing coverage
- Streamlined bug detection
Where Automation Testing Services Excel
While automation testing offers some advantages across the board, it is particularly well suited for certain projects. These include long-term projects that have already undergone some testing and require some regression testing, projects with high numbers of repetitive tests, and mobile apps that are tested across a wide variety of different devices.
If you’re working with an outsourced QA company for your software testing process, they can work with your development and quality teams to identify the best strategy to achieve your goals and meet your budget by looking at factors like the specific features of your software and available automation frameworks.
The Best Tools for the Job
A hammer is a great tool for pounding a nail into the wall, but it would hardly suffice if you needed to secure a screw to a railroad tie. Similarly, not all tools are designed for automation testing services, or at least, they don’t all perform at the same level. Developers have a variety of tools at their fingertips, so which are the best, and can they work together?
Appium
Appium is a favorite for automation testing because of its strong open-source community and versatility. This software can be used with hybrid, native, and mobile apps and automates mobile app testing without recompilation or a software development kit. Testers can use a variety of programming languages and familiar tools, as well as Android or iOS. For relative beginners, Appium can seem intimidating, but used in conjunction with the tools below, offers a comprehensive mobile app testing framework that novices and experts alike will benefit from.
Selenium
As a tool suite, Selenium is a popular choice for automation testing, in part because although it has been around since 2004, it continues to improve with new updates and versions. Selenium IDE is an integrated development environment for Selenium tests, which excel at exploratory testing and fast bug reproduction scripts. Selenium WebDriver supports dynamic web pages, and provides language-specific bindings for browsers–it is also compatible with all major browsers. You can use Selenium with all major programming languages, and you don’t necessarily need programming skills, although it may be nice for complicated test scripts. Like Appium, it is free and open source.
Katalon Studio
A natural choice alongside Appium and Selenium, Katalon Studio is a cross-platform solution for automation testing that is also open source and simple to use with its predefined structure of test cases, test suites, test objects, and reports. Like Appium, it has a robust community of QA testers with a wealth of knowledge and resources to help novice testers. For beginners, Katalon is a great choice, since you can record test scripts without programming know-how or easily create more advanced automation scripts with a little knowledge. It also supports keyword testing and the ability to add custom keywords.
TestProject
Although it doesn’t offer cloud support, TestProject helps simplify Appium and Selenium so that everyone can use it well via agents that users download to their machines, which allows users to skip downloading additional drivers and packages. It is easy to set up and works with many different mobile devices and browsers. It’s a good choice for mobile applications, although it works on the web too, offering an in-browser recorder that easily creates automated tests. TestProject integrates with existing CI flows, is easy to install, and is low maintenance. Like the others, it is open source, and you’ll enjoy easy-to-read reports and instant insights.
The Bottom Line
Mobile app and software development happens at incredible speeds, which means time spent in QA testing should be focused on accuracy and efficiency. Test automation is a great way to guarantee the best coverage with the most thorough results, ensuring code with fewer defects.
Ready to talk about how our software test automation knowledge and experience can guide your QA process and software launch? Get in touch today.