Software QA Testing Tools
Posted by admin on August 9th, 2007As the complexities of software development have evolved over the years, the demands placed on software quality professionals have grown and taken on greater relevance to incorporate Software QA Testing tools.
Borland’s SilkTest, which is one of the leading commercial tools for automating functional tests for enterprise software applications. The benefits of SilkTest is higher QA productivity, lower testing costs, higher testing coverage, repeatable test results, and ability to create test frameworks. Silk Test accesses applications as a real user, which emulates user actions via an agent component.
SilkTest 8.0 adds support for testing Eclipse-based applications, supporting Eclipse 3.0 and 3.1. Customers using the standard Eclipse framework can now leverage SilkTest’s powerful quality assurance capabilities. In addition, SilkTest 8.0 includes new support for testing applications running in the Firefox 1.5 browser on Windows, as well as Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 and .NET 2.0. SilkTest 8.0 is priced at $6,500 for a single floating user license.
Borland’s SilkPerformer which is an easy-to-use load and stress testing solution for optimizing performances of software applications. The main benefit of SilkPerformer is the ability to create accurate and realistic tests simulating thousands of users in a wide range of enterprise environments and platforms. These tests isolate issues and bottlenecks that could impact performance, reliablity, and scability. SilkPerformer is priced starting at $30,000 for 50 virtual users, but prepare to pay more for add-ons to support the testing of other technologies. For smaller organizations, SilkPerformer Lite starts at $7,995 for 50 virtual users.
There are many other such tools for QA testing on the market, but you will probably find that the professional ones like Silktest, SilkPerformer, WinRunner, and Loadrunner are very expensive to purchase.
Here’s a few tools that are the opposite:
Selenium is a testing tool for web applications and runs directly in Internet Explorer, Mozilla, and Firefox browsers. And supports testing on Windows, Linux, and Macintosh platforms. With Selenium you can automate regression and functional tests.
Apache Jmeter is used to simulate a heavy load on a server, object, or network and to analyze overall performance under different load types. Jmeter can also load and performance test HTTP and FTP servers as well as database queries using JDBC.
Thus, the benefits from using tools like Selenium and JMeter are
- Free
- It’s easy to use and has simple and intuitive GUI.
- It’s open source. You can modify the tool and add new features
The Disadvantages:
- There’s no gurantee of support or further development.
Purchasing commercial tools can be very costly, but if you are running enterprise applications and generating large amounts of revenue, it would be a wise investment to purchase a commercial tool.
August 11th, 2007 at 7:10 pm
hi Jim - I authorize the purchase.
But seriously, the test is only as good as the assumptions behind it. And the test can only break the tool, it can’t model the user experience - for example if the user in confused by a poorly worded or incomplete form page. Or if the page is missing elements that could save the user a lot of data entry time.
Would love to also hear your thoughts on that.
August 13th, 2007 at 12:55 pm
Hi Jeff,
Thanks for your feedback! I agree with you a 100 %. These tools are mainly used for QA testing purposes and does not accurately model the user experience. To examine the usability of a website you’ll need the input of
Usability experts, which transforms critical user behaviors and challenges into practical guidance for improving customers’ experience on real world software applications.
August 13th, 2007 at 1:50 pm
Thank you very much for sharing useful information
Warm Regards
Kumar
www.testerqa.com
November 9th, 2007 at 4:01 pm
I have used Selenium quite extensively and have found it to be both stable and extremely good at automating testing. One thing that you left off of your advantages for Selenium is that it has a reasonably sized community built around it that is constantly trying to improve it and the automatability of it. Look at something like Selenium on Rails, that allows you to write custom DSLs for testing in Ruby, something like that would never have come from Borland.