Role of Open Source Tools in QA Testing

Nowadays businesses needs more quicker time-to-market to their software products with no major expenses towards testing tools, at the same time they like make sure that the software bugs do not eat up their expenditures. They want affordable testing solutions which don’t compromise on quality to produce accelerated time-to-value. In the last ten years, the software testing industry has advanced from a small section of the application development lifecycle towards a market onto itself. A lot of industry standard testing tools at the moment are around to deal with various issues with the QA process, which range from simple unit testing to the end-to-end life-cycle management. Market evolution has resulted in increasing end-to-end charges for testing tools. However this is encouraging IT organizations to look for open source testing tools, that are usually more economical from being a total price of ownership point of view and still provide similar kind of functionality. Open source tools at the moment are an important aspect of the IT spectrum, and feature penetrated just about every facet of the software testing world. The day to day functions influencing the usage of the open source tools within the software testing industry. It may help a business cut down on investing in testing tools.

Usually, QA teams have a preference for working with commercial products more than open source software. Easily understandable with little bit of training, nearly all have very clear documentation along with tutorials. Support user-base via several channels for the issues, patches and progress. Teams spread expense of tools throughout the life of the usage. Tool needs long-term commitment, thus minimizing possibility of moving to a different tool. Popular commercial tools will have more amounts of people in the knowledge base. Open Source reduced total expense of ownership, reduces dependencies upon particular products or toolsets. Promote quicker time-to-market, Simple procurement, easy to usage, tool customization. Approach and the affinity in order to add to the community, thus promoting open as well as extensible architectural pattern of software. The below advancements have boosted the ante towards open source tools. The latest recession has tightened the organizational budget, getting open source tools a lot more attractive. Minimum ownership cost, flexibility, improved innovation, reduced development along with faster procurement and as factors behind choosing open source. Open source had grown to reach the top in the executive agenda, quicker, economical, as well as much better. Open source is strategically put in use to get competitive benefit. Open source offers greater innovation possibilities for IT professionals.

Many businesses have attained great results through using open source tools with the methodology of Agile development too. The reason is because of the character these tools perform in providing early code-driven tests and also consistent integration mechanisms, that are secret to the success in Agile projects. QA organizations eager to get maximum advantages by the open source tools come with similar questions about the most effective way for switching to open source testing tools. QA organizations should look into the below stated most important factors of the testing tool of open source configuration, deployment and the usage process. The majority of tools are designed to serve a particular purpose, having said that, option of source code indicates that organizations will be able to customize the tools as needed, by a little effort. Bugs found can result in big issues any time a project is under way, while a lot of support is given by vendors for the particular commercial tools, tool support has limitations to general forums as well as the tools community. Administration and maintenance expenses rise with the rise in project complexity & size, many organizations often ignore this component at the time of budgeting and end up having major deviations. Tools come with non-intuitive user interfaces, which make it difficult to give dedicated training. However, training material is usually found in communities, forums, and blogs. Various options of open source licensing mechanisms such as GPL, LGPL, and so on should be understood and then accordingly used. It's not easy to straightaway integrate open source software along with other tools. Limited derivation of metrics and limited reporting options tend to be the other issues for the QA teams and for IT management.

Open source tools could drive great quality as well as predictability within the testing life cycle, consequently cutting down overall application development expenses through keeping tool investments down. They help in fill the gaps within the life cycle, especially if IT has process maturity relative towards its whole process to application life-cycle management solutions. An important role is played with the open source tools during product development, particularly in Agile development processes in which time-to-market is vital. Lots of QA organizations look ahead to blending their processes by open source as well as with commercial testing tools. A very good combination of the two will be advisable to ensure cost optimization and the testing stability.

Mindfire Solutions has been providing software testing consulting services to its esteemed clients for over 15 years now. We have dedicated teams for web and mobile app testing. We have senior Selenium testing experts, who have been doing web application automation testing since 5 years. If you need any kind of assistance in your software testing process please feel free to get in touch with us now and our software testing team will revert back with a free quote within one business day. Also as a special offer, you can avail the limited period Risk-Free Trial Offer.

How Effective is Selenium for Penetration Testing

Need of Penetration testing: Testing is an integral part of software development life cycle. It is believed that without testing we can’t get a reliable product at the end of the development process. This implies the importance of testing and software testers in the industry. Understanding the fact, the top IT farms are now focusing more on their testing department in order to provide better quality of products for the industry. Today we are concerned about penetration testing. Well penetration testing is a type of testing approach that is performed to find each and every tiny loopholes of the application through a thorough inspection. It is usually done during the last phase of the software application to find if there are any security weaknesses, loopholes or database instability issue in the application. In other words, we can say penetration test is for testing the application if it is vulnerable to any security threats. Well in 21st century all our day to day life are mostly influenced by cyber world and hence most of our activities can be traced from internet. But it is really a bad thing to be trapped by a hacker. To avoid this, we must take the help of Penetration testing so that our user’s data remains in a secure environment. For the same, we can follow many testing tools but, selenium has its unique charm in the industry especially when we are dealing with web applications.

Why Selenium? Selenium is a next generation automation testing tool which is totally dedicated for the web industry. We can test any type of web applications through selenium irrespective of technology and platform. Well 21st century is highly dominated by new browsing devices like smart phones and tablets. Moreover top IT giants of the industry have introduced their operating systems for these types of devices like Android, windows and IOS. Hence a tester must ensure his web application not only fit for all these platforms but also serious enough about the security of user’s data in those applications. It becomes a complex situation for the testers to deal with all these platforms. To avoid this issue selenium can perform like a gem for the automation testers. Moreover it is extremely helpful for penetration testing along with other testing procedures.

Selenium for Penetration testing: As we discussed above, penetration testing is performed to find if there is any security loopholes available within the application. Fortunately selenium testers can perform penetration testing over any type of web application irrespective of language, technology and platform. The automation tester must have some basic knowledge on the language in which the web application is being developed. Because he has to write the test case in that language and then he can run the test case for efficient penetration testing. Well the selenium tester must ensure all possible security measures are taken in the application by writing and executing a strong test case for the web application.

Efficiency of Selenium as an automation testing tool: As an automation testing tool, selenium provides enough room for the testers in preparing and executing highly optimised and extremely efficient test cases that can avoid a single loophole in the application. Moreover it can save a lots of time, effort and money for the testing process and hence increases the productivity of the automation tester.

Mindfire Solutions has been providing software testing consulting services to its esteemed clients for over 15 years now. We have dedicated teams for web and mobile app testing. We have senior Selenium experts, who have been doing web application automation testing since 5 years. If you need any kind of assistance in your software testing process please feel free to get in touch with us now and our software testing team will revert back with a free quote within one business day. Also as a special offer, you can avail the limited period Risk-Free Trial Offer.