Sharing my top insights for the past month incl. top free tools for Test Engineers & Visual Testing
Top 10 free tools for Test Engineers. Why consider Visual Testing? What slows down a Proof Of Concept? Improving Selenium reliability. How to install Appium Inspector on Windows 10?
Lately, I've been working more on the dev side of QA but still with dotnet and selenium.
I'm also focusing on building Proof Of Concepts (POC) for different types of projects namely Visual and Integration Tests.
Top 10 free tools for Test Engineers
To begin with, here's a list of the top 10 free Tools for Automation Test Engineers according to my throughout experience on the subject:
Abdallah Yashir Ramsing
I would also include TestCafe, which is a battery-included Testing Framework that works with minimal config.
Create reliable tests and increase your test coverage. No WebDriver required, no manual timeouts, cross-browser capable out of the box.
Here's an example of the syntax:
fixture `Pizza Palace`
.page `https://testcafe-demo-page.glitch.me/`;
test('Submit a form', async t => {
await t
// automatically dismiss dialog boxes
.setNativeDialogHandler(() => true)
// drag the pizza size slider
.drag('.noUi-handle', 100, 0)
// select the toppings
.click('.next-step')
.click('label[for="pepperoni"]')
.click('#step2 .next-step')
// fill the address form
.click('.confirm-address')
.typeText('#phone-input', '+1-541-754-3001')
.click('#step3 .next-step')
// zoom into the iframe map
.switchToIframe('.restaurant-location iframe')
.click('button[title="Zoom in"]')
// submit the order
.switchToMainWindow()
.click('.complete-order');
});
Playwright looks to be another strong candidate with outstanding built-in features such as:
- being cross-browser, cross-platform and cross-language
- you can also test mobile web
- resilient - no flaky tests tests
You can read more on their official homepage.
Visual Testing
Abdallah Yashir Ramsing
I extracted a few slides when I prepared my Powerpoint presentation for a demo in Visual Testing.
This document illustrates the benefits of having Visual Tests for your applications.
The biggest pro for me is that you don't need to write a lot of codes to check for regressions whenever you deploy changes.
I've used Percy with dotnet as BrowserStack, the parent company, has recently added support for dotnet. Here's an example of running it via command line. You can also integrate it via your CI tool such as GitHub or Azure DevOps.
Abdallah Yashir Ramsing
What slows down a Proof of Concept (POC) Project?
As a passionate software developer and problem solver, I'm often working on Proof Of Concepts that aim to solve an existing set of problems differently. This includes the ongoing Visual Testing projects. Nevertheless, I also have other tasks to work on. So knowing how to balance them is important.
In the post below, I share my thoughts on how to create POC projects faster by reducing and/or eliminating obstacles.
Abdallah Yashir Ramsing
A bonus one might even be to write everything in less files as possible to begin with.
You might want to write tests or not esp. if you want to follow a TDD approach. Nevertheless, writing them might be plenty of time and effort.
Waiting with Selenium
My experience using Selenium for Test Automation in projects that have highly dynamic contents such as lazy loading is a constant struggle. I've shared my tips and tricks I usually use to improve the overall test suite reliability.
Here I tried to determine if Selenium can know when all the network requests have been completed before attempting certain tests.
Abdallah Yashir Ramsing
I believe there are better and modern test frameworks such as Playwright to deal with these use cases.
Installing Appium Inspector on Windows 10
Recently, Appium Inspector has been separated from the Appium Desktop tool in the latest versions. Since at the time of writing, there wasn't any specific documentation, I've shared my method here.
Eventually, looking at the analytics, my blog post, still as of this date 24/08/2022, is the first link when you search the title verbatim.
Abdallah Yashir Ramsing