How to Choose an Automation Tool

🎵 Music 🎵 I hope everyone is feeling good and before anything I want to thank you all so much for being here today I am Lia and I'm going to show you a process that you can use to choose an automation tool. I am going to do an overall comparison of three frameworks that I think are the best at this moment and I'm going to talk a little bit about other tools that you can integrate in your automation process. So a quick insight into who I am. I am a software engineer at Nokia. My main focus is on test automation and let's dive into this. So this is a three step process like all the good ones of course but each step will need attention and work. So let's move on and dive into the first phase that is analyze. So analyzing means answering some questions and the first one is not really a question is understand your application. So look at it and be really critic about it. Try to understand what are the weak points, the features that you can break more easily and try to think of edge cases in the application. So just have an overall picture of the application that you are going to test and make a list. Make a list of the tests that you want or need to do and at this moment it will be a good idea to talk with the development team and try to understand what are the coverage of unit testing that they have if they have and knowing their coverage you can avoid duplication of work by your side and if they don't have unit testing it's a really good opportunity to meet with them and with the management team and think of a way to do a coverage since the develop until the production and this means that have automation tests in all parts of the process so the development team will have unit testing and you can have end-to-end security, accessibility whatever types you think are more suitable for you so having this you will need to ask yourself if you want to code or not and ask your team if they feel comfortable doing this and in which language do they feel there will be more comfortable working so having this you will end up with a list more or less like this in what you have the development team has unit testing or not what type of tests that you are going to do and you'll have a language that you feel more comfortable working with if you choose to code so if you do not want to code there is not a problem because here we are inclusive and we have options for everyone and if you don't want to code I will give you two options that I know and be aware that I believe there are a lot more options for you so if these options that I'm going to give you does not suit or accommodates your needs just search for it and we are kind of entering here in the next part that is search but I'm going to previously tell you about Testament Perfecto and these two are similar in the things that they can do but just in a quick explanation these two record your manual testing and for each action that you do in the browser they make a block when you finish you'll have your test case and your automation that is a group of blocks and just like in coding you can create a group of blocks that you can reuse between tests you can create folders to run in each deployment you have a full group of options that you can have just like in the coding so if you don't want to code just take a look at these two and dive into this because I'm sure that you will have options for you as well so if you do want to code I'm going to do some comparison between Selenium Cypress and Playwright and this is more or less what you going to do in the search part with the frameworks that you choose to compare and for Selenium, starting with Selenium Selenium is a framework that is here for a long time and this means that Selenium has a large community supporting it and you will not be alone working because you will have Stack Overflow to help you with a large group of people that can help you and overall it is a really good framework but it will need third parties to work with certain types of tests so Selenium automates the browser so it simulates a real browser interaction meaning that if you need to do API testing you will need to integrate with a third party to have the API testing and since Selenium does not support by itself parallel testing you will need to integrate with Selenium Grid and a cross-browser tool to make it work and for me the most downside for Selenium is it does not have an inbuilt report tool so you will need to have a third party like X-Ray or Test Rail that I'm going to talk a little bit in the end to support this and it does not support iframes or popups so if your application depends on third parties iframes, Selenium is going to be a really not go-to framework but if this is something that you can live with without Selenium is really really good to work with a large set of tests but like I told you it will need third parties integration for some type of tests and this will make it more difficult to work in the beginning I'm not saying that it's impossible because nothing is impossible but you will need to have some experience and some expertise to understand what are the workarounds that you need to do here okay so it is a good tool if you want something easier to start with let's move on to the other tool and understand what are the differences here so with Cypress, Cypress is an all-in-one tool meaning that you can have the development team doing unit testing and you doing the other types of tests in your site and have the whole team working with the same framework and this is cool because you can take it out with each other and try to understand and review code from each other and it is very complete it has an inbuilt report you don't need to integrate with any third parties here but the downside is that you only work with JavaScript here and it does not support parallel testing and multitap testing meaning that if you need to have certain types of configurations that need to be run at the same time example if you want to have a browser with a device and various configurations about this you will need to run them separately so it will be a very huge time running the test case so if you need to have various set of configurations here various environments running at the same time you need to consider if Cypress is going to be a good tool for you but for starters and for a small medium group of tests Cypress is really good it's very simple tool to work with if you work with JavaScript of course it is a very simple tool to work with and it has a lot of documentation the community is growing so you will have help with stack overflow for any help any type of data that you need but it has its downsides just like all frameworks that you will encounter here. Moving on to Playwright Playwright is a fair new framework the first time that I heard about it it was here in 2020 if I'm not mistaken and it is I think the most complete of the three you can have all types of tests running in Playwright it supports parallel testing so you can have various sets of configuration and environments running at the same time it has context isolation so you can have tests for new tabs and clicks for open into a new tab it can capture videos and screenshots so you can have visual testing in comparison but it is a new framework so be aware there are some types of features that are not completely developed so if you look for a framework that is settled maybe Playwright is not the go-to and since it is a new framework the community is not very large compared to the other two so you will need to have some experience with coding and expertise programming and searching for things because you are going to be a little bit alone in this because you have the community of Playwrights taking doubts but Stack Overflow is not really filled with questions and answers for how to move with Playwright so be aware that you will need to take a lot of time trying to move with Playwright and the documentation is a bit confused because since it does a lot of things it's kind of messy to work around with but if you want to take the time to work with the framework that does it all for itself I think it will be very good to work with with Playwright so just in an overall of this tree I think that you need to choose what you feel comfortable with so have a look at the tree just play around with each one of them if you have that time and choose one that you feel comfortable working with because this is something that you're going to work with like six hours of the day so don't choose one because your friend told you that this is the best or I tell you this is the best just choose one that you feel comfortable and that fulfills most of the needs that you have for testing an application so moving on to this you will end up with a board or you should end up with a board more or less like this where you have the type of test that you need at the right at the left I'm sorry and check and cross or ups and downs of the framework that you are comparing and just in a side note each one of them has options to work with accessibility tests the one that I know is AXE that you can integrate with the frameworks and you can have appletools to each one of these three to run visual testing have in mind that Cypress and Playwright do this by itself with screenshots and videos but if you want to have a third party working with this you can work with appletools so after this you will choose or not a reporter and this is going to be a quick comparison because I don't want to go very deep into this because I think that choosing a reporter is not a decision of the quality team only it should be a decision of all the product team because everyone should be integrated in the process but just in a quick comparison X-Ray has integration with Jita, Test Rail also has integration with Jita but it's not so obvious that it's there and X-Ray you can create test plans, test execution to integrate with the issues that you have in Jita, this having in mind that you work with Jita if you don't work with Jita this is not a very good option for you but in my opinion X-Ray is a more integration tool with Jita and to be visible for everyone in the team what is being testing and what is being doing for the quality team and Test Rail is more on the downside so if you want a tool that the quality team will work with separately from every other team I will go with Test Rail and if you want a tool that is more integrated with the process and the product team and the development team I will go with X-Ray but moving on to the plan part that is the importance, I will not say the importance but the part that you will have to take a little more time to understand how you are going to do this so the key word here is prioritize and what I mean by prioritize is choose what tests are you going to do first and this could be the most painful end-to-end test that you do manually and it can be the simpler test that you do just to start with and try to understand if you can work with this framework so just unite the team and if you are by yourself don't feel sad just do this and think about it really sit down and take a look to what you are going to do and what is going to be the first thing that you are going to do and parallel to this do documentation this is very important because the knowledge cannot be only in your mind you need to share it with the world with the team with the company so that people know what you are testing to be reassured that the application is stable to go to production and just for you to have some place where you can rely to understand what you did in the past because right now if you are starting it is very easy to understand what you're doing but in six months or one year from now I really doubt that you remember what you are thinking when you start the project so if you have documentation it will help you to have place to go to remember what you are thinking in the beginning to show to other people what are being testing in the application and it's good practice so I know that some development person people really don't wanna take the time to do documentation but just do it it is good practice and you're going to thank me in the end believe me and after you have this after you have the list of test types that you wanna choose and that you choose to do I'm sorry and the framework that you choose to work with the reporter that you think is best for the team to use and the prioritizations of the tests that you are going to implement now it's time to schedule a meeting with the management team or with the manage so have this really structure in a way that when you present this there is no option for them to say no so you did all the work you analyze the product you search for the frameworks you plan the the work that you are going to do in the next month two months in the next time so present this with the certainty that the team and you want to do this and are very sure that this is the best thing for the team and for the product and be confident about it this is important to tell you because I think that sometimes people just think that all this is my opinion but be really confident that this is the best thing to do and you are going to do this and share that confidence with the management team and be reassured that they will not cut your legs they will be really really happy to let you do this so have lots of fun working with this programming or not programming and if you have any doubts just go for it thank you so much and see you next time bye