Visual Studio Web Test vs. Selenium - selenium

This can be a very opinionated question. Please keeps your posts factual.
What are the pros and cons of using Microsoft Web Test in Visual Studio? Conversely, what are the pros and cons of Selenium?

The major difference between Visual Studio Web Test and Selenium is how each tool works.
Selenium works at the UI level. Tests are recorded and played back against UI objects in the browser.
VS Web Tests work below the UI level. Tests are recorded and played back against HTTP requests/responses.
Depending on your context, one of these tools will be a better choice. If you are focused on functional test automation, requiring the use of the UI, Selenium is probably a better choice. If you are trying to load test, VS is the way to go.

Related

Selenium vs Cypress for tests that hit databases, elasticsearch, filesystem, etc

I am getting ready to start a new automation project and have done some reading on Cypress as a Selenium alternative. Given that Cypress apparently runs directly in the browser as opposed to Selenium's approach, is it difficult to perform test steps with Cypress tests that fall outside the browser such as communicating with a data store, interacting with services and interacting with product infrastructure such as remote file systems? With my limited exposure to Cypress, I have only seen browser tests so I was hoping someone could shed some light on this.
When it comes to automated testing for web applications, there are two main contenders: Selenium and Cypress. Both have their pros and cons, but which one is the best?
Selenium has been around for much longer than Cypress and is therefore more widely used. It is also more flexible, allowing for tests to be written in a variety of programming languages. However, Selenium can be slow and unreliable, and it is not as easy to use as Cypress.
Cypress, on the other hand, is a newer tool that is gaining popularity due to its simplicity and reliability. Cypress tests are written in JavaScript, making it easier for front-end developers to get started with automated testing. Cypress is also faster than Selenium and can run tests in parallel, making it more efficient.
So, which one should you use? It depends on your needs. If you need a more flexible tool that can be used with different programming languages, Selenium is a good choice. However, if you want a tool that is easier to use and more reliable, Cypress is the better option.
If you need access to things outside the browser, I would go with selenium. This is what I currently do, I have a webdriver wrapper which has "plugins" loaded so that I can make db statements, query the webserver and additionally issue selenium commands to the browser.
If you're looking for just test 100% within the browser, then cypress may be the way to go.
Alternatively, you could use selenium for workflow tests and cypress or even qunitjs for intra-browser unit tests.
In the app I work on, I actually ship a page which contains a qunit page with all of the in-browser tests. Then in a selenium test, in addition to the rest of the workflow, I browser to the qunit page and report on their status as well.

Selenium and Database testing

I am totally new to the web application and automation testing.
I am learning selenium from youtube videos and developing frameworks.
while looking into the videos most of them cover only testing the Application as such.
I found very few videos which state about interacting with the database and verifying them.
I just wanted to know how will this be in real time projects?
In real time projects will they automating scenarios like configuring something in the UI, then validating it in the database, coming back to the UI and continuing the UI flow or will it be simply only verifying the UI.
I want to know more about how to do database testing.
Any info here will be of great help
Selenium is one of the best choice available in today's market when it boils down to Automation of Web Application. Selenium have support for Mozilla'a geckodriver, Google's chromedriver, Microsoft's IEDriverServer & even Safari etc. Hence Selenium is widely accepted as the best Web Automation tool as of today.
Having said that, though you too can perform Database Testing through Selenium but it's not the ideal candidate. Database Testing can include transaction rates & round-trip calculations for which there are other tools which does those work better and you may like to explore those as well. Alternatively, you can also integrate those tools in your Project Framework and work with Selenium in tandem.

Web apps with selenium test suit

I am looking for web applications with selenium test cases. Does anybody know any of these web applications?
I'm not really sure what you are asking, but Selenium is used to create test cases FOR web applications. It is not a feature of web apps.
If you are looking for a simple way to test a web app, you could try the IDE: http://seleniumhq.org/projects/ide/
This tool is something that beginners could use.
If you want a page that can give a demo of Selenium tests in action I am not aware of one. The best is to either, try Selenium IDE (as Blaine has suggested +1), or, if you have some coding experience you could try Selenium WebDriver (also referred to as Selenium 2) which is easy to code and allows for a bit more control when writing tests.
A simple search will also provide you with many Selenium tutorials as it is a fairly popular testing package.

GUI Testing tools forBusiness analaysts

I have been looking around stackoverflow for automated GUI tools for testing our web app gui from a Business analyst point of view, so that means strictly requirements-record-playback kind of testing since we are not really programmers.
We have used selenium in the past but unfortunately it is no longer compatible with Firefox 4.
Is there a similar tool to selenium that allows recording and playback of GUI tests that does not require a lot or any scripting on a windows platform? thanks
You can use the FireFox add on compatibility reporter to get Selenium working on FF4
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on-compatibility-reporter/
Or alternatively drop down to FireFox 3.x and use that just for your testing!
For the server component Selenium-RC (necessary to execute tests), You must run Selenium-RC 2.0b3 (or higher if it become) to be compatible with Firefox 4. I have used it succesfully with FF4.
Selenium IDE, the recording tool, for firefox is indeed not available as a plugin for FF4 (but I speculate it will be coming soon).
I think that you can benefit from AutoIt (http://www.autoitscript.com/site/autoit/) I`d been using it to test Windows based GUI, but to the best of knowledge there are lot of scripts to test/play on-line games, thus it is applicable to Web Sites.
It does not require deep technical knowledge, but of course it will be much better and frequently mandatory to optimize the generated code. I`ve started my experience with this tool, and I was doing my work flawlessly.
At one company, I was developing automated tests for web app by means of TestPartner (Compuware company) it was one of the best tools Ive ever worked with, it generates VB code quite 'intelligently' and supports user with administration features. But Im not sure whether it is possible to use it without paying.
Good luck !

Advantages of Powershell for web-ui testing?

I am working on a commercial project which is a web-based app which will be bundled with an app/web server (JBoss), which is deployed, with the web app files, at runtime.
I've seen links about how Powershell can do UI testing. Is there any advantage in Powershell for web-testing as opposed to Selenium or VS2010's coded UI tests? (Selenium has poor documentation, which is in Powershell's favour, but I am interested in more functional reasons).
Thanks
Powershell will give you advantage if you need to manipulate something else than a browser/webpage/webapp. With Powershell you can do something with OS, applications, things outside the browser.
If you don't need to do that, if you want to automate only web based app, than I would suggest using web specific tool. Selenium is nice, tests in MSVS2010 are great. If you prefer coding try WatiN for .net, and WatiJ for java. All of them will run smoothly not only inside IDE, but also on CI server.