What Is Automated Testing?

Automated Testing is the testing of products created by software developers to deliver bug free software and applications using automation tools such as Selenium, Mocha and others listed on our website. The use of these tools makes the entire process faster and more efficient testing is built to support Quality Analysts. Automated testing supports Quality Analysts and is a process in which software tools execute pre-scripted tests on a software application. The purpose is to define repetitive tasks and create or modify a test automation framework allowing constant test execution, reporting and comparisons, saving time and money.

What Is Mocha?

“A five-minute coffee break is all that I need, while the testing tool does its job on its own.” Mocha is a flexible, adaptable and function-rich open-source test framework, used for JavaScript test applications, running on Node.js. It comes with a wide range of features that help to test synchronous and asynchronous JavaScript concepts in the browser. Before deploying into production, JS code can be extensively tested in depth using Mocha.

Mocha is extremely popular and very well maintained. It has over 21k stars on Github at the time of writing and has been around for over a decade. Its documentation is well written and easy to follow.

What Is Karma?

Karma is a test runner, and not a testing framework. It is not an alternative (or in competition with) frameworks such as Mocha or Jasmine, instead it works with them. It was created by the Angular team, and there are available plugins for all the popular test frameworks. In addition, a tester can also choose to write an adapter for one of their favorite frameworks. In essence it spins up a webserver from which to run tests.

What Is Appium?

Appium is a freely distributed opensource mobile application UI Testing framework; an ecosystem of tools and libraries. It allows native, hybrid and web application testing and supports automation tests on physical devices as well as an emulator, simulator or both. It provides cross-platform application testing, i.e., a single API works for both Android and iOS platform test scripts. Platform examples are android, iOS, desktop apps (Windows, Mac) and now on platforms like Smart TV and much more.

It supports all languages that have Selenium client libraries; examples are Java, Objective-C, JavaScript with node.js PHP, Ruby, Python, c#, etc. This means users can often use the programming language they are happier/more comfortable with when writing automated scripts/test codes. It was originally developed by Dan Cuellar in 2011, using the programming language C#, and called "iOS Auto". It is now developed and supported by Sauce Labs and can be summarised as a Cross–Platform Mobile Automation Tool.

What Is Cucumber?

Cucumber is an open-source software testing tool written in Ruby; it supports Behaviour Driven Development (BDD). It offers a way to write tests that anybody can understand, regardless of their technical expertise. In BDD, users first write scenarios or acceptance tests that describe the behaviour of the system from the customer’s viewpoint, these are reviewed and signed off before developers write their codes. It allows automation of functional validation in easily readable and understandable format (like in simple English) which is useful for developers, testers, clients/customers etc.

What Is Jasmine?

As a behaviour-driven development framework for testing JavaScript code, Jasmine does not depend on other JavaScript frameworks. BDD (behaviour driven development) tools, are great for testing complex patterns and functions JavaScript.

What is Javascript TestRunner

How Javascript TestRunner originated; a Journey from HTML Webpages to Javascript TestRunner (which then became the Original Selenium):- In 1989 Sir Tim Berners-Lee proposed an Internet HyperText system and it was known as Hyper Text MarkUp Language (HTML) and was used for Web pages. Prior to this Text for newspapers and magazines was ‘marked up’ by editors before being sent to the typesetters, so they knew the font size, whether it would be in bold or italics and so on.

When wordprocessors appeared, they could send text straight to the printer and cut out the typesetter, the program ‘sent Text Markup Language (TML)’ to the printer; this it was similar to HTML e.g. to turn bold on and to turn it off.

Before HTML, text on computer screens looked very ordinary, however the introduction of HTML brought the text to life and could include images; the format and appearance of a webpage now looked very similar to a page in a magazine or newspaper.

In 1995 JavaScript was invented by Brendan Eich. His first version (where the languages syntax had to resemble that of Java) was completed in 10 days and called Mocha, but renamed LiveScript and then renamed JavaScript.

Scripts allowed developers to make webpages responsive and perform numerous functions/tasks etc., however, whereas before the use of scripts, webpages just needed proof-reading for ‘typos’, now they needed testing, which was done manually at first. Changes to code could cause problems - it was said to have a bug - a term used in electronics, which sometimes referred to a real bug stopping an electrical circuit from working). Testing became more intensive as webpages /web applications (WebApps) incorporated more code.

In early 1998, Brendan Eich co-founded the Mozilla project (which was free and open source), creating the mozzila.org website. The script was JavaScript, which he also created.

In 2004 a developer called Jason Huggins was working on a web application that required repetitive (manual) testing for frontend behaviour on different browsers; and he wrote a script (developed a tool) to automatically ‘Run the Test’ (amongst other things it ‘injected Javascript underneath the webpage’); he called it the JavaScript Test Runner. A Test Runner is a tool that is used to run or execute tests and export results.

To get around the requirement for JS-Injections, Jason Huggins worked with his colleague Paul Hammant to develop a server component (in Java) and TestRunner was ported to Ruby. This is how JavaScript Test Runner (open source) became the ‘Original Selenium’.

What Is Katalon?

Katalon was developed by Katalon Inc. and is a low-code Automated Testing Software Solution that is built on the open-source frameworks Selenium and Appium; it has a specialised IDE interface for Web, API, Desktop and Mobile Applications. It works on Linux, Windows (7,8,10) and MacOS (10, 11) and Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Safari, Internet Explorer and Headless browsers. It has dual scripting interfaces for testers with different programming skills and can be used by people with no programming skills, who use a simple interface that does not require the writing of code. More proficient testers can use scripting with code suggestion, syntax highlighting and debugging.

What Is Playwright?

Playwright is a headless browser automation platform, similar in part to Puppeteer. It can target several browsers including Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Edge. Developed and maintained by Microsoft, Playwright is a test automation framework that allows the user to perform comprehensive automated testing directly on major browsers. This tool is designed with multiple features such as an auto-wait option, capturing of test trace, flexibility and perhaps most importantly cross platform and support for several coding languages. Playwright is one of the few test frameworks that can use other languages as well as JavaScript / Typescript. Test cases can be written in .Net, Java, TypeScript and Python, and it runs cross platform on Windows, Mac and Linux.

What is Protractor?

Most importantly Protractor has been abandoned by its maintainers and is end of life Summer 2023. Given its 8.8k stars on Github and its heavy usage by certain parts of the Angular community, it is still worth understanding. Protractor is an opensource end to end testing automation tool built by Google, for Angular and AngularJS applications. Although it might be expected that the tool can only be used for Angular applications, it can also be used for non-Angular applications. The testing is automated on an actual browser.

What Is Puppeteer?

Puppeteer was originally created by the Chrome/Google development team, Puppeteer automates Chromium based browser (Chrome, Edge, Brave and even Firefox). It runs in both headless and interactive mode. Headless being the default, it runs the browser emulation without needing to render it to screen.

With a massive 79.8k stars at the time of writing, this is one of the most popular libraries on Github, and is used by many organisations for many purposes ranging from test, to gathering information for several purposes. Adappt used this in 2020 to gather Covid stats from each govt for the World Health Organization.

The real power of Puppeteer is that it will faithfully render pages in the same way as Chrome / Edge, using the very latest release of the Chromium engine and all whilst running in headless mode. This makes it perfect for integration into CI/CD pipelines running on servers without GPUs

Puppeteer can be used for automated browser testing. It is fast and robust and has a ‘clean syntax’ that allows the user to write readable tests.

What Is Selenium?

Selenium is now one of the most popular free (open source) automation tools and automates the browser to perform the many actions that would have previously been done manually. As mentioned, it records; has playback, and highlights errors while testing web apps. It can run multiple scripts across several browsers.

Selenium Test Scripts / Testing can be written in multiple coding/ programming languages, such as C#, Ruby, Scala, Perl, Python, Java, JavaScript, Groovy and more.

It supports various operating systems and works across various browsers (e.g. Firefox, Chrome, IE, Edge, Safari, Opera) and devices.

It is easy to install and provides constant updates. It has multiple simple and easy navigation tools to assist writing test cases without requiring scripts.

What Is Watir?

WATIR is an acronym for Web Application Testing In Ruby and is pronounced the same as the word ‘water’, it is a simple and flexible tool. It is an open-source family of Ruby libraries for automating web browser testing, and the Watir WebDriver (the modern version of the Selenium based Watir API), it drives/supports Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari browsers. It is a simple and flexible tool and facilitates the writing of automated tests which are easy to both read and maintain.

It interacts with a browser the same way a person or a manual tester would do, in effect it mimics a real person, it logs in, clicks on links, fills in forms, validates text and so on.

It also runs in headless mode (HTMLUnit).

What Is Webdriver IO?

WebdriverIO is an end-to-end framework for web and mobile application with scalable and robust solution. WebdriverIO is a progressive end-to-end framework for automated testing of web and mobile applications. It comes with a set of plugins which allows the setup to be easily integrated and extended. This helps to create stable, scalable and robust automated testing. It is an open-source testing automation framework written in JavaScript and running on NodeJS. It’s very useful for testing native mobile and web applications for iOS devices.

Webdriver is an open-source project on GitHub which has been around since 2013. It has over 7k stars since the time of writing and is well maintained. Due to the ease in managing and with a respectable number of followers, this project has seen a growth in its popularity in recent years, in part due to the ease with which it can be managed. Its simpler architecture means it is faster than heavier frameworks like Selenium.