Monday, March 16, 2015

.NET Automated Web Testing Solutions

If you are looking into implementing automated web testing in your organization, there are several choices for Microsoft-centric organizations.

  1. Selenium: http://www.seleniumhq.org/
  2. Visual Studio Action Recordings/Visual Studio Coded UI Tests: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd286726.aspx
  3. TestCafe: http://testcafe.devexpress.com/
  4. Telerik TestStudio: http://www.telerik.com/purchase/teststudio

Now,  Selenium seems to be the obvious choice for companies that do not want to pay any money for testing automation, but I would highly advise against using it.  The Browser Recording is dependent on Mozilla Firefox and can only generate limited types of tests.  It generates NUnit Unit Tests by default, so if you are using an alternative Testing Framework, you will have to convert all of these Unit Tests to your desired testing framework by hand.  Overall, I have had bad experiences with open source tools and frameworks and therefore tend to avoid them on the whole.

Visual Studio Coded UI Tests are very appealing for the reason that they are integrated into the entire Visual Studio developer experience.  Creating these tests are primarily geared for developers, so your Testing team is probably going to be reliant on Visual Studio Action Recordings which are still considered manual tests.  In addition, if your team is not licensed to use Visual Studio Premium or higher, you will not be able to create Visual Studio Coded UI Tests either.

TestCafe is a testing suite from DevExpress and is by far the most affordable and most user friendly tool amongst the tools listed but does not appear to have the deep integration with the Microsoft toolset as either the Visual Studio tooling or the Telerik tooling.  The recording capabilities are remarkable and require no coding effort, making it ideal for testers. 

Telerik Test Studio has the most robust feature set but is also the most expensive tool.  If a company is already licensed to use Visual Studio Premium, the sheer cost of purchasing the Telerik Test Studio suite for the entire testing team is a hefty price indeed.  Telerik Test Studio offers many of the same features as Microsoft Test Manager and Visual Studio Coded UI Tests without the requirement to write code.  Test Studio's support for multiple browsers also make it better suited for cross-browser testing than the Microsoft tooling.  Companies that are very seriously committed to automated web testing and have the necessary funding to purchase Telerik Test Studio licenses will definitely consider this tool as their tool of choice. 

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