* Please let me know if this question is in wrong forum before down voting. I will move it *
Hi,
I am researching open source industrial alternatives for LoadRunner/NeoLoad for web application testing that can be run on windows machines. I want to know if there are any open source tools which can provide functionality like LoadRunner does. Of course, a freeware won't have that much efficiency but I am looking primarily for following features:
1. Windows support.
2. Ease of Use, UI script recording is preferable.
3. Good number of protocol support.
4. Features of load generation and analysis.
5. Scheduler and reporting capability.
6. Community support.
The tools which I have looked into.
1. Jmeter (This is by far the best option, but I need to find an alternative)
2. FunkLoad (Os dependent)
3. Grinder (Only supprts testing for Java APIs)
4. Multi-Mechanize (Works only for linux)
Grinder support is not limited to only Java API, it supports HTTP, SOAP, JDBC, POP3, SMTP, LDAP and JMS.
Another good tool is Gatling.
You can also look into Tsung, it more Linux/Unix oriented but can also be run on Windows via Cygwin
All 3 above offer record-replay capabilities.
I believe that Open Source Load Testing Tools: Which One Should You Use? will be quite helpful in your research.
There are zero open source tools which reproduce the complete functionality of the big commercial tools, LoadRunner, SilkPerformer, Rationa|IBM Performance Tester, Neoload, SOASTA, etc..
If you put the appropriately skilled person behind any performance tool, even the most expensive ones, you will have a positive return on your investment. Choose the wrong user and there is no tool so cheap that you will not have a negative ROI. It is this last condition which drives many organizations to abandon their current tools and move downstream, the people that they have hired sing constant choruses of "blame the tool" when the real reason is "I don't know how to use the tool."
Related
I am working on implementing accessibility (for visually impaired individuals) for one of our web application. It need to be ARIA compliant. Right now we are testing our changes with screen reader manually.
For example we have Tree control in our application. I open NVDA screen reader and then navigate through my Tree Nodes. NVDA screen reader speaks out
Node XYZ expanded, (When I expand XYZ node with right arrow key)
Node XYZ collapsed, (When I collapse XYZ node with left arrow key)
Along with the voice it also write down this text.
But all this is manual. Now we want to setup automated test cases for the same so that any regression bugs can be caught by are test cases. Do there exist any such tool which we can use to automate our test cases. Any direction will be helpful.
PS: Just for a sake of comparison. We have nunit to write test cases for c# application. After writing test cases we integrate them into our build process. Any breaking change is caught when we run the build. I am looking for something similar to test out our aria compliance and screen reader's behavior with our web application.
I don't know of any existing tools for testing screen readers, however, there are accessibility APIs that test websites and web applications.
axe-core from Deque Systems is widely used and well-supported.
I wrote a python package to run automated web accessibility tests that uses axe-core and selenium.
While it isn't quite what you are looking for, it does cover about 60% of accessibility guidelines, including aria roles and attributes. It should help with determining screen reader usability.
You could integrate axe into C#, similar to my python package and the Java package, also created by Deque.
I hope this helps!
It sounds like you're already performing some pretty good manual accessibility testing against your web application, which no automated testing tool is going to be able to replicate completely. That said, if you're looking to take care of any low-hanging fruit with an automated solution, like Kimberly suggested, there are several automated accessibility testing tools out there that you can relatively easily integrate into your existing web application's testing framework that might help you.
One such tool is Continuum, which doesn't have a C#-based library offering at the moment, but could be used in a separate testing framework to be run against your web application after it has already been built. This may be preferable depending on your use case, as code linters for accessibility aren't perfect and are highly language-dependent, whereas testing the HTML of your web application more closely matches the screen reader use case you say you're trying to test for. You could even integrate Continuum into your existing CI/CD process to make sure your application is tested during development as opposed to afterwards, to reduce your manual accessibility testing load.
Continuum has a few sample projects to get you started, depending on your technologies of choice. Free versions are available at webaccessibility.com if you're interested. Most of them are Java- or JavaScript-based at the moment.
Appreciate this is quite an old question, but having explored this area a lot recently thought was worth updating with the state as of 2023 as there is now some progress in this space.
Current tooling available at time of writing (that I’m aware of, may not be exhaustive):
guidepup - NodeJS automation for VoiceOver and NVDA supporting all keyboard commands and getters for spoken phrases (disclaimer: I’m the author).
auto-vo - CLI for navigating sequentially through a page with VoiceOver and reporting the spoken phrases, also exports a separate Node module for some interactions with VoiceOver.
screen-reader-reader - NodeJS automation for VoiceOver and NVDA for starting, stopping, and getting spoken phrases.
web-test-runner-voiceover - NodeJS plugins for #web/test-runner to automate VoiceOver testing.
nvda-testing-driver - .NET automation for NVDA supporting all keyboard commands and getters for spoken phrases.
assistive-webdriver - NodeJS implementation of a Webdriver server that allows remote testing of screen readers (e.g. NVDA, JAWS) running in a VM.
As stated in other answers, there are also a number of static analysis tools such as axe, as well numerous browser extensions offering similar static analysis, and companies such as Assistiv Labs offering remote environment services to interact with screen readers manually (similar to SauceLabs/BrowserStack/etc. but for screen readers, magnification etc. - no affiliation and haven’t used services so can’t vouch, simply an observation).
Worth calling out that none of these cover the full range of a11y requirements - there is more to a11y than just screen readers. A combined/layer approach including automation, manual testing, and user testing likely preferred.
Hi I have a Swing application to test and I found Sikuli a nice tool to do it, but I am a little worried about the size of the community and if it's being continually developed and it's being used by other companies.
Do you use it?
For what?
Is it stable?
Is it the best tool for the job you needed?
I use it in my company, too.
It can be used quite easily for not too complex gui-tests.
Sikuli was not developed for the last year but development is now increasing again.
Questions in the Sikuli-FAQ section on launchpad are answered fast although the community is not that big.
In my company, Sikuli is used for gui testing which was previously done by human testers.
It saves some time but not everything is automatable with Sikuli, e.g. the OCR functionality is not dependable (but will be updated from tesseract 2.04 to 3 in the near future).
For my job it was the best tool because it is the only open source (=free) tool I found that provides screenshot based automation that can be integrated with other systems like CI-systems and is programmable with Java and Python which makes easy unit testing possible with JUnit or PyUnit.
Hope I could help.
Yes we use it in-house for testing. It is actively supported. I have reported bugs in Sikuli and have had tickets and workarounds suggested within days with the bugs fixed in the next revision.
It is quite stable. The problems I have encountered typically come from not specifying images correctly and the program selecting an incorrect area of the screen.
One of our more unique uses was creating a set of automated bench tests for a legacy embedded system. The system was written in assembly and had no unit testing capabilities. It communicated with a custom legacy PC application. Rather than try to locate the PC source code, reverse engineer the design, and then write some meaningful bench tests, we created a number of Sikuli scripts to interface with the PC app. It saved weeks of development.
Yes, we use it for automating GUI tests. It's used mostly for old systems that were developed with no test driven back end. (ie: no testing api)
We tests some very complex tools including a debugger using Sikuli.
We tend not to use the Sikuli IDE though.
Just new on software testing...
Regarding testing, I think GUI applications are pretty difficult to automate. Some testing involves with interacting particular GUI objects in particular sequence (e.g., clicking buttons). The interface often changes from one window to another. And the timing and sync sometimes also pose an issue (e.g., recording mouse clicks and replaying may screw up).
Is there any solution for testing such applications with less human labour? Thank you for sharing your experience.
Yes, GUI apps are indeed tough to automate. Regardless of the app's technology (Swing, web, WPF, iOS), you first have to focus on automating high-value tests. Moreover, test automation shouldn't be at just the GUI level, it should be a mix across unit, integration, and functional (GUI) tests too.
Are you working on a web app? If so, have a look at great open source tools like Watir or WebDriver. (I'll also pitch Telerik's Test Studio to you; however, for full disclosure I'm their evangelist for that tool.)
Desktop applications (or mobile) bring a lot of challenges to automation, and it's totally dependent on what platform you're working with. Test Studio supports WPF, but you can also look to other commercial and a few free tools. I don't know of any tools for Swing apps, but that lack of knowledge is due to me having been out of that domain for many years. (And maybe I'm so out of it that Swing's not even the normal Java GUI toolset...)
iOS and Android are tough ones to find reliable automation tools for. I know the Frank framework/API will work on iOS (Test Studio has a free recorder in the App Store), but I don't know of any other tools that reliably support the extraordinary matrix of Droid hardware and OS versions.
Regardless of your platform and toolset, you need to learn the basic approaches for dealing with GUI testing: focus on high value tests, learn to avoid duplication through approaches like Page Object Pattern, learn how to deal with synchronization/timing issues in your specific application.
It's a long haul, but if you work carefully it's totally worth it.
(And fun, too, IMO.)
I have been working on Test Automation from last few months and have been using the tool named "Testcomplete". But I have noticed that the tools do not matter a lot in the field of automation. Only thing you expect from an automation tool is the ability of the tool to spit out the recognition strings for the different controls used in the test application.
Apart from this, you will always have to build a automation framework which will serve your needs writing code.
So my question is, Is my thinking that automation tools do not matter a lot in the field of automation correct? In the sense, you can use any tools to get your automation running. Or Do the tools really matter? (Please ignore the costs factor of the tools). Also if I need to learn a new automation tool, then what do I concentrate on? Or how do I go about learing the tool? In short, what exactly does "learning a tool" mean?
My 3 best reasons for choosing which tool to use:
it works. This is important, not all tools work in all scenarios i.e. flash, silver light, adobe air, legacy apps with no automation support, etc.
whole team skills. This includes not only testers, but also developers. Test automation shouldn't be an isolated effort, developers should also collaborate on it. This is far easier when dev and test are using the same language/platform.
price. Doesn't have to be free (but it could), but of course its an important factor.
Personally we use the same test runner as the one for the unit tests. That along with extra third party automation pieces that do the plumbing for you.
Some additional thoughts on why the tool is important:
Community - What's the user community like? Are there a lot of user-generated resources out there to help?
Support - (if vendor) What's customer support like? Do they fix problems quickly? Is it easy to find solutions to common problems?
Extensibility - Often in test automation, you'll need to roll your own or code work-arounds, if the tool does not support a particular type of object in your application. How easy is it to extend the product? What programming language does the tool use? What kind of support do you get from the IDE?
An other piece of advice: sometimes you'll need wrapper classes around certain frameworks. We were using WatiN, which was really good at its time, but it lacked Chrome (it had a small percentage that time) support. The thing that killed WatiN for us was the lack of coping with new FireFox releases: FireFox 8 was out, and we had to run on our tests on FireFox 3.6...
Selenium was the solution, but it had a totally different logic and we already had more than a 1000 tests.
So we had to create a wrapper class around Selenium to "fake" it was WatiN. We had some issues, but we had to rewrite only some special cases... And not all tests.
The point is, sometimes, support for frameworks just cease to exist. But with an own framework focusing on what the test actually does instead of how it works would save you in this situation.
Variety of Test Automation Frameworks and Test Automation Tools are already available in the market. Thus, I would not recommend the built your own Test Automation Framework at all.
As far as selection of automation tools is a concern, I would say it does matter on the following basis:
Support: How much level of support you have when you are choosing an automation tool for your project.
Community: How big community is using that tool and how responsive that community is about sharing knowledge?
Pricing: (Proprietary or Open Source) Last but not the least is the pricing of the automation tool that you are planning to introduce in your project.
QA teams' expertise also matters sometimes. For example, in case your QA team does not have a developer or semi-developer skills vs Not-Technical QA Team, etc.
Regarding the Automation framework, there are many automation frameworks also available in the market already, therefore no need to reinvent the wheel. and selection of automation framework mostly depends on your selection of scripting language.
For example, if you choose python as your scripting language, then you have option to choose UnitTest, PyTest etc. as an automation framework.
In case of Java, you have option of JUnit and TestNG as an automation framework.
and so on, the base on your selection of scripting language.
Finally, when it comes to structuring your automation framework, it solely depends on many things as the following:
Your nature of the project
Single product vs multiple products
and many more...
Check an example of multiple product automation project directory structure. https://github.com/pancht/python-selenium-framework
I hope, in some way, I would have helped you out in giving an answer to your question.
Thanks,
Panchdev Singh Chauhan
A project is looming whereby some code that I will be writing may be deployed on any hardware that potential clients happen to have. Its a business application that will be running 24/7 so I envisage that most of the host machines will be server type boxes but smaller clients might, for example, just have a simple PC.
A few more details about the code I will be writing:
There will be no GUI.
It will need to communicate with another bespoke 'black box' device over an Ethernet network.
It will need to communicate with a MySQL database somewhere on the network.
I don't have any performance concerns as a) the number of communications with the black box will be small, around 1 per second, and the amount of data exchanged will be tiny (around 1K each time), b) the number of read/writes with the database will be small, around 5 per minute, and again the amount of data exchanged will be tiny and c) the processing that needs to be performed is fairly simplistic.
Nothing I'm doing is very 'close to the metal' so I don't want to use languages that are too low level. Ease of development and ease of deployment are my main priorities.
I'm not expecting there to be a perfect solution so I can live with things like, for example, having to have slightly different configuration files for Windows machines than for Linux boxes etc. I would like to avoid having to compile the software for each host machine if possible though.
I would value your thoughts as to which development language you think is most suitable.
Cheers,
Jim
I'd go with a decent scripting language such as Python, Perl or Ruby personally. All of those have decent library support, can communicate easily with both local and remote MySQL databases and are pretty platform independent.
The first thing we need to know is what language skills you already have? This is likely to be a fairly big determiner of what choice you would ideally make.
If I was doing this I'd suggest Java for a couple of reasons:
It will run almost anywhere and meet the requirements you've outlined.
Its not an esoteric language so there will be plenty of developers.
I already know how to program in it!
Probably the most extensive library ecosystem of any of the development platforms.
Also note that you could write it in another language on the JVM if your more comfortable with Ruby or Python.
Sounds like Perl or Python would fit the bill perfectly. Which one you choose would depend on the expertise of the people building and supporting the system.
On the subject of scripting languages versus Java, I have been disappointed with developing command line tools using Java. You can't directly execute them, you have to (1) compile them and (2) write a shell script to execute the jar file, this script may differ between platforms. I recommend Python because it runs anywhere and it's got a great SQL library, mysql-python. The library is ready to use on Windows and Linux. Python also has a lot less boilerplate, you'll write fewer lines of code to do the same thing.
EDIT: when I talked about JARs being executable or not, I was talking about whether they are directly executable be the OS. You can, of course, double click on them to run them if your file manager is set up to do so. But when you're in a terminal window and you want to run a java program, you have to "java -jar myapp.jar" instead of the usual "./myapp.jar". In Python one just runs "./myapp.py" and doesn't have to worry about compiling or class paths.
If all platforms are standard PCs (or at least run Linux), then Python should be considered. You can compile it yourself if no package exists for your version. Also, you can strip the standard library easily from things that aren't available and which you don't need (sound support, for example).
Python doesn't need lots of resources, it's easy to learn and read.
If you know Perl, you can try that. If you don't use Perl on a daily basis, then don't. The Perl syntax is hard to remember and after a week, you'll wonder what the code did, even if you wrote it yourself.
Perl may be of help to you as it is available for many platforms and you can get almost any functionality by simply installing modules from CPAN.
Python or Java. They both are easy to deploy on both the server environments and the desktop environments you mention - i.e., Linux/Solaris and Windows.
Perl is also a nice choice, but it depends on how well you know Perl, how well other people that will maintain your code know Perl, and number of desktop users that are savvy enough to handle an install of the Windows Perl version(s).
As Java supports Python via Jython, I'd go with a JVM requirement myself, but I'd personally go with a Java application all the way for such a system you describe.
I would say use C or C++. They are platform independant, though you will have to compile for each platform.
Or use Java. That runs in a Virtual Machine so is truely cross platform and not a slow level as C.