So much of our world has moved away from the slow and methodical, towards the agile and iterative. In transport, for example, everything is “on demand”, constantly changing and adaptable. The same is true for developers. With movements and philosophies such as CI/CD solutions, everything is about moving quickly, yet smartly.
Test automation is an integral part of this development philosophy. We’ll take a look at 3 popular test automation tools, and help you decide which one is the right fit for your organization.
Before we jump into the 2 testing tools, a quick note on the importance of test automation. Automated testing frameworks can “help quality assurance engineers define, execute, and automate various types of tests that can help development teams know whether a software build passes or fails.” In the CI/CD environment, test automation literally becomes part of the continuous flow and cycles of development.
Let’s take a look at the 3 platforms:
Test.ai is a machine learning-based platform that has been trained to recognize common user scenarios and execute test cases. The platform leverages AI to identify the various screens and elements in your app, and to execute user scenarios to enable you to test on-demand whenever you’re ready. It also recognizes elements, so that things don’t break even when they change.
Test.ai is relatively quick and easy to set up, requires no programming knowledge for more basic functions, and the platform can execute tests even when the user interface or certain flows in the app change.
Even though the company has been around since October 2015, and has raised around $17m, there is a definite lack of quality peer reviews available. This is concerning as most companies of this size would have multiple reviews available, from different companies and roles, giving an indication of the level of robustness of the solution, as well as insights into which types of projects the platform is better suited to.
Test.ai claim “larger unnamed partners that ‘make app stores’ or devices…working at the stratospheric level having to verify tens of thousands of apps to ensure that everything is in working order”.
Testcraft bills itself as “codeless Selenium with ai maintenance”, for automated manual testing with no framework or maintenance. It is primarily a platform for web apps, and is a complete SaaS solution, with a shallow learning curve (and no coding required).
Its automation platform includes regression and continuous testing capabilities, a drag-and-drop interface, and the ability to run tests on multiple browsers and work environments at the same time. TestCraft promises faster test creation, execution, and maintenance, through its dynamic test model that can be updated to reflect changes to your app. Its interface is simple and easy to use.
Areas, where there could be an improvement, are an occasional lack of responsiveness, some issues with urls from outside of the app itself, changing datasets can be confusing, and there are quite a few bugs that still need to be ironed out.
Testim.io leverages machine learning for the authoring, execution, and maintenance of automated test cases. The platform uses dynamic locators and learns with every execution. The outcome is super fast authoring and stable tests that actually learn and improve, eliminating the need to continually maintain tests with every code change.
Well known companies such as Netapp, Verizon Wireless, Wix.com, and others run over 500,000 tests every month using Testim.io. The platform has gained acclaim for significantly shortening the time from development to production, to minutes in some cases. It allows the testing of new features with full regression test coverage. Test stability is known to be high, with easy-to-understand results. The platform is also easy to connect to your chosen CI and discover and fix bugs, with helpful screenshots along the way. Customer support is known to be excellent.
But, there are some issues that have been brought up for improvement, such as image verification, but these are being dealt with according to company communications, and barely detract from what is otherwise an excellent product.
Most reviews conclude with some form of a “we cannot recommend one product, it all depends on your needs”. In this case, however, we have found testim.io to be a top performer in most categories, and feel compelled to recommend it.
This choice is further enhanced by the numerous positive reviews and big names using the platform.
When it comes to continuous integration and continuous delivery, areas like automated testing and automated log insights become essential, integrated tools – not merely welcome additions.
For machine learning-powered log analytics, look no further than Coralogix. With Coralogix, you get virtually endless seamless integrations, dashboards and live streams, view hours of data in seconds and get automated insights into any log issues. CI/CD has found the perfect log partner.
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