TestBusters Newsletter Special by qtestiq

Dear Readers,

The ongoing debate of comparing Selenium with Playwright or Cypress is akin to comparing apples and pears. Selenium, as mentioned on the official web site - is a library for automating web applications for testing purposes. Not more, not less. That's the fact.

However, recognizing the challenges and limitations of Selenium, it is time to introduce the Selenium Toolkit – Orca. This innovative solution transcends the confines of Selenium's original purpose, delivering essential features that make it comparable with the likes of Playwright and Cypress.

While Selenium remains a robust web automation tool, the Selenium Toolkit – Orca extends its capabilities to bridge the gaps, offering a comprehensive solution for multi-platform testing, PDF comparison, simplified test data handling through a CSV interface and other helpful features.

In essence, the debate shifts from apples versus pears to a unified approach that combines the strengths of Selenium with the advancements of the Selenium Toolkit – Orca. It's not about choosing between tools; it's about elevating your test automation to new heights.

To witness this transformation in action, contact hello@qtestiq.ch for a demo or a Proof of Concept.

Elevate your testing. Get ready for a new kid on the block.

Happy Testing!

Rudolf aka #theCharmingOrganizer

Shaping your Test Automation

We are allowed to question ourselves again and again. We live in such a fast-paced world, where what was considered an unshakable fact yesterday is now being completely turned upside down. This is especially true for software development. No, we won't go into the topic of generative AI today, like most articles that are currently being written, whereby exactly with AI such facts are rewritten.

Today I would like to talk about the topic of test automation and the change we are currently observing here, although AI will probably play a major role here in the next few years too. More than a decade ago, it was widely discovered that functional testing should be automated, at that time there were still large test factories with a large number of manual testers. It was the time when there was a clear demarcation between development and testing, and even though you knew what white-box testing was, you always assumed that developers didn't test anyway.

So it was only logical that test automation was geared towards the testers, business analysts, or even the business unit. So it had to be "No Code", "Record & Play" and "Clickable" as far as possible. On the one hand, because most of the users had no development experience, but also because complex system tests (e2e tests) were to be automated.

With the agile transformations that are currently everywhere happening or have already been implemented in different companies, we are now all in the same "product boat" and have to work together to ensure that quality is good through engineering excellence. In other words, test automation is not simply a topic for the tester or the BAs, but for the whole team. As part of this change, we also see a partial rethinking of test automation. On the one hand, unit and integration tests are to be automated and integrated into pipelines, and on the other hand, the development skills are now also available to have the test scripts available as code. That's why we're also seeing growth in the use of Selenium, Playwright, Cypress, and other development-related test automation tools. This does not mean that the tools, which are "no-code" and can map complex test cases, are no longer needed, but rather that it is no longer the last ripcord, but that a lot of quality engineering is already done in advance. We from qtestiq are supporting this change by holding Built in Quality Workshops, Offering Trainings for Selenium and Playwright but especially with our Selenium Toolkit.

Selenium is still one of the most widely used test automation solutions today, especially when it comes to web. The advantage of Selenium is that there is a very large and active community and is also a W3C standard, so you can always find solutions to obstacles you encounter. In addition, you don't need any licenses for Selenium, which also means that you don't need a big budget for the tooling itself.

But there are also challenges with Selenium. In itself, Selenium is only built to control a browser remotely, but not the various elements in it. For many important topics around the test itself, Selenium does not offer a solution, e.g. for test data handling, reading and interpreting results, reporting and much more. In complex cases, scripting can be very tricky and requires a lot of maintenance.

For this reason, qtestiq offers the Selenium Toolkit, a solution that includes all the advantages of Selenium and at the same time offers solutions for the other topics. It comes with very easy handling of the browser including multi-browser and multi-platform testing (browser/mobile), easy handling of test data and test reports as well as the integration of third-party providers such as Jenkins and Gitlab for CI/CD and automated analysis. By working with the Selenium Toolkit, you can save a lot of time in scripting Selenium tests and keep maintenance to a minimum.

The Selenium Toolkit is the perfect solution between a test automation tool, where you not click but code, which can then be versioned with the application code, for example. And a test automation framework that offers the integrations with various important tools needed for a professional test automation solution.

By recording screenshots including information about Xpaths, debugging is also child's play. By issuing assertions both in the event of failure and success, we offer the highest possible transparency. With the integration of Allure Reports you get a professional way of reporting incl. all necessary information.

Through further integrations, e.g. to NeoLoad or STEP, the Selenium Toolkit also offers support for performance testing. And with the integration of Dynatrace, the world's leading observability tool, important metrics can be included in the test reporting right away. The Selenium Toolkit is constantly evolving and yes, AI will certainly become a topic here as well, but first we would like to introduce you to a few recent updates, which come with the new version Selenium Toolkit – Orca.   

Multi-Platform-Testing

Since several years Multi-Browser-Testing, so testing your web applications using different browser already have become a standard. And with the “mobile first” strategy in many companies also automated testing of mobile applications is essential. With the Selenium Toolkit you can create Multi-Platform-Tests with journeys starting in Mobile, switching to Browser and back again. You even can decide to use different browser versions and devices plus even further also use different actors / roles and all of that in just one test. The handling is 100% supported by our WebDriverManger, which means there is very little effort for the developer.

PDF Comparison

Compare output not only visual but actually the data has been added as a feature to the new version of the Selenium Toolkit. You can configure different ignore patterns so that parts of the document can be different like Names, Dates, other values. This feature simplifies testing of output to a maximum and is very simple to implement.

CSV Interface to simplify test data handling

Last but not least we also come with a CSV Interface with a 100% automated mapping to the different classes. This allows you to reuse your test script maintaining your test data in a very simple way in a CSV file and use it for the test. You can add one class to the data provider and by this all input data in the CSV file will automatically mapped to this class. This will again reduce maintenance time and simplifies the handling of different test data.

You haven’t seen yet the Selenium Toolkit and would be interested to have a Demo or start a Proof of Concept – contact us via hello@qtestiq.ch.