Everything You Need to Know about Testing Tools
Historically, the market for testing tools arose later than the market for development tools, but recently it has been developing very actively. Reputable companies use the most effective testing tools, which make it possible to detect any imperfections in the performance of software. What testing tools are offered today in this market? Learn more about them to have a clear picture of how software testing company can provide you with the best result.
Automated Testing Tools
More recently, testing of programs was carried out manually either by the programmers themselves or by users, which could hardly be called a systematic approach and also did not allow evaluating the quality of the code. A little later, testing stood out in a separate area of knowledge as part of software development, but quickly came to the realization that manual testing is inefficient, since it requires a lot of labor and a lot of time. The first test automation tools were almost libraries that could be used to write tests, which required the tester to be able to program at the developer level. Modern automated testing tools allow you to create automated tests with minimal human involvement.
If we conduct a superficial classification, the testing automation tools can be divided into two groups: functional tools and load testing tools.
- The first group includes tools designed to verify that the application meets business requirements;
- The second group consists of tools for checking and evaluating application performance.
The market of functional testing tools today mainly presents the products of the following companies: HP (QuickTest Professional, WinRunner), IBM (Robot, Functional Tester), Borland (SilkTest) and AutomatedQA (TestComplete), which are application development tools. Moreover, some of them use "industrial" programming languages (for example, QTP is used as the VB script development language, and Functional Tester is implemented in the Eclipse environment and allows you to create scripts in Java), and some use "dialects" or their own special languages (for example , Robot uses SQABasic, and TestComplete uses 4Test).
Most of the popular tools are oriented to work with Web-applications or with ordinary applications written in .Net or Java. At the same time, support for "old" platforms, such as Centura or PowerBuilder, is provided mainly by the largest developers of testing tools, HP and IBM.
Which Tools Are Best?
The developers of automated functional testing tools respond quite quickly to the emergence of new mechanisms and software development platforms. And yet, despite the fact that there is a huge variety of different products for automated testing on the market, some software companies prefer to create their own tools adapted for testing the applications they develop. There are at least two reasons for this: the high cost of automated testing tools and the uniqueness of the tested software, which does not allow the use of standard testing automation tools.
