Software Testing Tools and Automated Software Testing Tools

Software Testing Tools

This is a summary of our favorite software testing tools that have saved us a LOT of time and money in outsourcing and development.

Pay4Bugs – The Best Software Testing Tool

pay4bugs.com

Pay4Bugs - Software Testing Marketplace

Pay4bugs is an online marketplace that brings software developers and testers together. Pay4bugs allows developers to hire real people to perform their tests (the rest of the tools listed here deal with automated testing).

The developer sets up a project, which may consist of one or more assignments. (An assignment is a set of instructions relating to a single test or group of tests.)

The developer then sets a price (a “bounty”). Testers only get paid if they find bugs and the bugs are marked “valid” by the developer. Once a bug is reported, the developer has seven days to review it and decide whether it is valid.

Pay4Bugs works so incredibly well because it is at the heart of the free market.  You only pay as much as you are willing to pay for each quality bug found, but there’s a catch – if you bid too low, nobody will want to test for you.  Due to the web being international, prices end up being orders of magnitudes cheaper than anywhere else, especially for Americans looking to outsource.

Software Testing Tools – CANOO WEBTEST

Canoo WebTest provides an automated way to test web applications. Using either an XML file or a program written in Groovy, you tell WebTest which URL to visit, which form fields to “fill out” and which links or buttons to “click.” You also specify what the results should be. WebTest performs the test and outputs a report describing what each part of the test did, and whether it failed or succeeded.

WebTest has an easy syntax with steps having meaningful names that can be understood even when you don’t know WebTest. Additionally, the recorder allows you to quickly generate a first draft of your tests that you can adapt and refactor to build robust tests suites. Don’t forget: capture/replay is the least cost-effective way of automating test cases!

WebTest’s reporting capabilities are perhaps its most important feature. JUnit-style reports are not enough to understand why a test fails; WebTest reports provide all information allowing you to quickly understand the failure cause.

Software Testing Tools – SELENIUM

Selenium records your keypresses, clicks and other actions and allows them to be played back later for testing purposes. The Selenium Remote Control server can automatically start and kill web browsers and acts as an HTTP proxy for those browsers. It works with IE, Firefox, Opera and Safari, and is compatible with Windows, OS X, Linux and Solaris. To use Selenium IDE, which lets you record your browser activities for later playback, you’ll need Firefox on Windows, OS X, Linux or Solaris.

Selenium also has an API that works with C#, Java. Perl. PHP, Python and Ruby.

Here’s how you create tests with Selenium’s software testing tools:

• Record and play back your test in Firefox
• Use the Selenium IDE to export your test to one of several programming languages, including C#, Java, Ruby, PHP and Python. This allows you to integrate your tests with an existing testing framework
• The tests are made up of a series of Selenium commands, which are sent to the Selenium Remote Control server or the Selenium Grid server

Software Testing Tools – WATIR

Watir is a set of Ruby libraries designed to automate web browsers. Although Watir was written in Ruby, it supports web apps no matter what technology they use. It also supports a wide range of web browsers, including IE on Windows, and Firefox Windows, Mac and Linux.

Watir will drive web applications that are served up as HTML pages in a web browser. Watir will not work with ActiveX plugin components, Java Applets, Macromedia Flash, or other plugin applications. To determine whether Watir can be used to automate a part of a web application, right click on the object and see if the View Source menu option is available. If you can view the HTML source, that object can be automated using Watir.

Work is proceeding on Watir drivers for WebKit (Safari and Chrome) and Opera. The website states that the OS X Safari driver and the Chrome driver are usable, but are still considered “experimental.”

Software Testing Tools – WATIN

Inspired by Watir, WatiN is a web application testing framework that runs on the .NET platform.

The WatiN home page says that the framework supports frames, AJAX, and JavaScript popups, all essential to testing today’s advanced Web applications.

WatiN supports IE 6, 7 and 8, and Firefox 2.x and 3.x.

At the moment, WatiN supports Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 2003 and Windows 2008.

Using WatiN on Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 2008 needs a little extra work due to the Protected Mode. You need to add the domain of the website under test to the trusted sites list. This will turn Protected mode off for your site; then your WatiN tests will run properly.

There are several other software testing tools, but this is a great place to start. We love Pay4Bugs for testing beta products and “crowdsourcing” them before going to the final masses.