Gartner is known as the world’s leading IT research and advisory firm. Gartner research publications are commonly considered as a high trust source of reference for customers to evaluate their products from various industries in the world. To provide you with more insight into the software industry, as well as its product offerings, in this article, we will give you an overview of the three latest research of this technology business field.
Best Test Automation Tools as of quarter 1/2019
Gartner recently announced the result of its annual Gartner Peer Insights “Voice of the Customer”: Software Test Automation publication, providing users better insights into the software test automation industry’s latest products.
All Gartner reviews go through a strict analysis and evaluation process to ensure they are qualified, high accuracy, and authentic. To be selected as a Customer’s Choice, vendors have to meet the requirement that owning a product aligned with relevant markets, receive an overall rating of 4.2 or higher out of 5 stars and have at least 50 approved customer reviews.
The followings are the top choices of the Gartner Peer Insights ‘Voice of the Customer’ in the Software Test Automation industry:
Katalon Studio, developed by Katalon, is a powerful automation solution with a comprehensive and integrated set of features for Web, API, and mobile test automation that users can implement into their CI/CD pipeline. Katalon’s most popular product – Katalon Studio – is considered a tool that is easy to use, rich with features, and user-friendly for both novice and experts. Katalon Studio also supports a wide range of software methodologies such as data-driven testing, behavior-driven integration (BDD), CI – DevOps practices, and more.
Visual Studio IDE is a quality integrated development environment from Microsoft. Furthermore, it is also considered as a complete tool to develop applications that are based on Web, cloud, system, and data and a great alternative to existing lightweight IDE.
Selenium WebDriver is known for being the most popular free and open-source test automation framework. According to the peer reviews, Selenium WebDriver is commended for its flexible support of multiple system environments, browsers, and programming languages including Java, Python, C#, and PHP.
Developed by Neotys, NeoLoad is a testing platform for enterprises to automate tests from APIs, mobile, to web applications. It is commonly recognized as an “excellent and great tool” with a strong feature set to analyze test results. The peer reviewers also commend it as “a very efficient and up-to-date-interfaced platform.”
Parasoft provides innovative tools that automate time-consuming testing tasks and provide management with intelligent analytics necessary to focus on what matters. Parasoft products, including Parasoft Development Testing Platform, Parasoft Virtualize, Parasoft SOATest are recommended for their flexibility, comprehensiveness, and rich features such as integration with Selenium WebDriver, XML messages, functional API testing, and so on.
Developed by Micro Focus, Unified Functional Testing (UFT) is praised as a top-notch tool for web-based and API testing. The paid software is considered a value automation solution that is also easy to use and implement. UFT is also packed with versatile features, as well as the technical support services.
The Austrian software company is known for the two most popular testing products: Tricentis Tosca and qTest, which provides solutions to optimize Agile and DevOps. Peer Insights reviewers recognize these products as a “scriptless automation solution” and a great tool for ERP testing as well as many other technologies.
The goal of Gartner’s report is to give users a recap of the latest research of the software industry, providing them with more insight into different types of product offerings based on end-users’ reviews and Gartner’s validation criteria.
Shift-Left Testing: A Requirement For DevOps Teams To Release Products With High-Quality Faster
“Application leaders responsible for developing digital business applications are under increasing pressure to maximize quality and velocity of delivery,” according to QASymphony, an Atlanta-based agile software testing platform. Undoubtedly, applying a “shift left” testing approach has become an essential condition for development teams to deliver higher quality software faster.
However, major challenges persist, and new ones have emerged in recent years. The followings are 3 major challenges that software development teams are facing throughout the software development life cycle.
- Instead of focusing on testing features, Software development teams have a tendency to concentrate more on the first phase of a development cycle – Coding.
- Manual testing and integrate with other tools is a costly and time-consuming process.
- User-interface-driven testing is also slow, fragile, and does not provide full test coverage.
Proposed solution
- – “Test early, test often”. Software development teams should start testing features at the beginning stage and throughout the entire development cycle.
- – Application leaders in digital business should combine testing and coding into one activity and perform it at the beginning of the development cycle.
- – Team leaders and testers should make it easier for developers to receive feedback about the quality of changes by implementing continuous integration (CI) and automated testing.
The report also proposed a restructuring of the Test Automation Pyramid to allocate automation efforts and yield maximum benefits.
The Critical Capabilities For Software Test Automation 2019
These critical capabilities are evaluated based on five common testing use cases: Continuous Testing, Open-source-based Testing Acceleration, Progressive Web Apps/Responsive Web/Native Apps, API/Web Service Testing, and Enterprise End-to-end Testing.
- Match to nontechnical role skills
This criterion measures how suitable and user-friendly the product is, not only to test automation experts but also to other roles with limited to no testing experience in the team.
- Match to technical role skills
This criterion evaluates the product’s ability to help test automation experts – including testers and developers with proficient coding skills – enhance their productivity.
- Templates and accelerators
Whether and how well the product supports industry verticals and/or vertical applications through templates and accelerators.
- Change impact analysis
This measures how effectively the product helps identify sets of relevant test cases that need to be executed when there are changes in requirements and/or functionalities. This criterion also considers other factors such as risk, criticality, or business priority.
- Cross-platform and cross-browser support
This criterion addresses the range of platforms, browsers, and environments on which the product can operate, including Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS.
- Intelligent automation
Measures how well the implementation of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, self-healing heuristics, bots, and automatic (re)generation of tests the product offers.
- The breadth of technology support
This criterion evaluates the product on its coverage of different technologies, including UI frameworks and widgets, API formats and protocols to allow end-to-end testing.
- Integration Capabilities
How well and how much the automation product integrates with other tools and environments, including IDE, CI/CD, defect management, and ADLM.
- Open-source support
Whether and how well the product supports well-known open-source tools and frameworks such as Selenium, Appium, JUnit, and so on.
- Dashboards and reporting
This final capability assesses the product’s ability and effectiveness in providing tracking tools after the tests have been executed.
Overall, in this context, there is no doubt that automated testing is replacing the manual process gradually as it increases effectiveness as well as efficiency.
