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By Edward J. Correia
July 22, 2008 —
Last week, I wrote about “The Forrester Wave: Functional Testing Solutions, Q3, 2008,” a recent report that evaluated the six leading test-tool vendors offering manual and automated testing along with test management in a single solution. Qualifying vendors also earned at least US$10 million in annual revenues.
To contrast, this week I’ll present some open-source alternatives to those sometimes pricy products. To be fair, I should also mention that several companies, including AutomatedQA, MKS and Original Software—not to mention Microsoft—also offer solutions in this space.
There were a few ways I could have done this. I decided to visit the one Web site I knew of that contained the most information about the greatest number of open-source tools for software testers, and that's opensourcetesting.org. Using a few simple searches, I compiled lists of some of the more interesting tools for automated testing, manual testing and test management.
I found just one tool project—Salome-TMF—that offers all three capabilities sought in the Forrester report (more on Salome later). The remainder of today’s tools provide the capabilities in various combinations, but for all, the price is right.
Automated Testing
Topping the list was the Software Testing Automation Framework, also known as STAF. This multi-platform, multi-language function testing framework features reusable components such as process invocation, resource management and logging; an execution engine; and a GUI monitoring app. It’s built on Python and XML.
HtmlTestCase is a unit testing tool that consists of classes to simplify automation of HTML function testing. Intended for QA staff members that are slightly technical, tests can be specified using a high-level API.
If you’re versed in Perl and looking to automate IE app testing, you might try Win32::IEAutomation. This object-oriented tool, still in early development, treats all methods as user actions, and it is said to support the testing of complex apps, even those employing dynamic frames and pop-ups.
Automate the Windows GUI with pywinauto, a Python package that’s easy to use and requires no pre-recording or screen capture. It even comes with a screencast to show you how.
Systir stands for System Testing in Ruby. Not to be confused with a tester for Ruby code, this tool was written in Ruby for writing system-level tests in a domain language. If in the product description you have to explain what it’s not, I suggest a different name.
Faban is a project from Sun for developing and running benchmarks. It has two major components: the harness and the driver framework. The harness automates the running of server benchmarks. There’s also a Web interface to launch and queue runs, and functionality to view, compare and graph run outputs.
The Simple Web Automation Toolkit, or SWAT, allows QA engineers to automate Web application testing. IT includes a C# library that provides an interface for different Web browsers and components to integrate with FitNesse.
Manual Testing
Doit: Simple Web Application Testing is a scripting tool and language for testing Web applications that use forms. It can generate random or sequenced form fill-in information, report results (into a database, file or stdout), filter HTML results and compare results to previous results, without having to manually use a Web browser. It uses a console-based Web client tool (like Curl or Wget) to send and receive HTTP requests and responses respectively.
The Eclipse Test and Performance Tools Platform (TPTP) provides performance testing of HTTP applications, JUnit testing and manual testing. TPTP is a mature project with a thriving developer community. The project provides extensible framework and services on which developers can build test and performance tools to precisely suit their needs.
Test Management
If you're using Bugzilla, you might want to try Testopia, a plug-in for Mozilla's bug tracking system. Though it was originally designed for tracking test cases, it's generic enough to track any aspect of the development process. It also allows the integration of bug reporting with test-run results.
"Be-monster not thy feature, wer't my fitnesse." Shakespeare's King Lear was apparently the inspiration behind FitNesse, a wiki, Web server and testing framework that allows teams to collaborate on test specification and execution, and document creation.
Salome-TMF can create and execute manual or automatic tests, track results, manage requirements and defects, and produce HTML documentation. It works with Abbot, Beanshell and JUnit to define automatic tests, and with Bugzilla and Mantis to manage defects. Salome-TMF also is extensible.
Doubtless there were tools I missed simply because their descriptions or keyword tags lacked the terms I used. So if I missed your favorite, e-mail me. Maybe I’ll get another report out of it.
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