Eggplant Digital Automation Intelligence alternatives and competitors

In my current project, we are working with an online pharmacy system, and for this system we maintain prescription details for patients. For example, patient names and other details such as where the patients live, what medications they need, and other types of information for various scenarios.

Then there is information for the doctors, such as what prescriptions there are in the system, and from which doctors they have been prescribed. These are the types of scenarios and test cases that we are automating with Selenium.

Specifically, I have been using Eggplant Functional and the Java Selenium pack, and Selenium WebDriver is the driver we use for developing the automation and scripts for the different test cases we use. This is our main testing tool for the online pharmacy system project and it is deployed on the cloud on a virtual machine because we are working from home now.

Selenium HQ has helped us through its automation capabilities, because testing manually takes a lot of time and money. For instance, we have now automated an end-to-end application for the test cases. So now it's really easy for the testers, and it reduces the time and effort taken to do their work.

There are many phases that must be completed while delivering the product to the client, and in the system integration testing phase we can easily execute our automation and scripts, which saves us a lot of time and enhances the testing process dramatically.

There are many useful features in Selenium that I like, and of the new features I particularly enjoy the Selenium Grid. With this, we can run many test cases in one go, and in one suite we can extract multiple results.

Because Selenium also supports parallel test execution, I believe it is one of the best testing applications out there.

Beyond the many advantages that Selenium HQ brings, there are also several disadvantages. For example, there are some complex scripts which can make Selenium unreliable in some cases.

For email-based applications, we can't automate as we would like to, making it necessary to bring in a third-party product to do so. Eggplant, for example, offers email-based processing, like with the OCR engine, and for automation testing and reporting I would like to see a similar feature in Selenium.

I've been using Selenium HQ for at least one year now. 

I find it a reliable solution for the most part. But in some cases it is only as reliable as the third-party code it works alongside with. For example, Selenium doesn't have automated generation code, so we are dependent on other tools for this. And as I have mentioned, we also need to use third-party tools for things like email-based applications.

Selenium HQ can be scaled with the use of parallel test execution, and when it comes to expanding its use more generally, it's possible to add on to its automation functionality with third-party tools as well.

For our work with Selenium, we have a support team that helps us so we can go through them when we have problems. But for the small things, we generally solve problems ourselves. We are able to do self-study when it comes to support, and we also have a tech support architect who is able to help when needed.

The initial deployment was simple, as we are not doing anything too complex with it. We're using Azure DevOps for the deployment, so we test for that with a test plan and build up the pipeline accordingly, so we can execute and get the test execution report in order to find out what other test cases were impacted, and what other test cases we need to resolve. Doing it this way, we can easily find and fix any bugs in the deployment.

We have built up some custom implementation strategies when it comes to our daily use in Selenium HQ. For the test cases, we first verify which test cases we need to automate by coding some common functions, like logins and other common functions that are present in the application. After that, we look at the locators we will need to select using XPath, and then we start building the test cases according to the specific application, using code from all the common functions.

In the implementation team, we have six people who are using Selenium HQ for our current project. There are more people in other projects that I have running, but for this one there are only six of us. One or two are technical leads and the others are project engineers.

When it comes to maintenance of Selenium, we leave that up to others. We are mainly responsible for automating all the scripts that we deliver to the client.

Selenium HQ is open source and our use of it in our company is provided for free.

I would surely recommend others to use Selenium as we do, especially because while using Selenium we can use Java concepts as well. It's great that, through Java, anybody can use Selenium; even novice programmers. In today's market, automation is a big part of every organization, and Java programming skills can hugely enhance the use of tools like Selenium.

One of the biggest lessons I learned was during my time as part of the development team. I didn't want to work in the manual testing team and so when my development project was completed, I moved to the automation department because I wanted to carry on being productive. With this move, I realized that I could easily learn other tools and technologies that are useful in the market, by adapting my programming skills in Java, Python, or any other programming language, to working with tools such as Selenium. In addition to my Selenium work, I also now do Rapid Automation as an automation engineer.

I would rate Selenium HQ an eight out of ten.