Eggplant Test Reviews

I manage a team of testers. It's more of a software team, but I manage a team of testers that utilizes Eggplant every day. The reason we picked Eggplant was because the testers don't have a lot of coding experience.

Eggplant Functional is a GUI automation tool. We only use it for GUI automation. The applications that we use it for are mainly desktop applications.

It is not a test management tool, it's not like Jazz or QF-Test, it's a GUI automation tool. So when you look at Facebook or LinkedIn, that is the UI, the user interface. It's buttons, it's scroll downs, it's menus, it's drop downs, it's how a user navigates through the application. That's the only thing we use it for - GUI automation. It is not a test management tool. Test management tools are like Jazz.

It's on-prem. It has to be for our job because we do a lot of classified stuff.

The features that I have found most valuable are that it has a spot for everything. I know developers really utilize its OCR function. It needs to be tuned a little bit more, but as an all-around tool, it's probably the best GUI automation tool out there. The reason for that is because of its recognition, it's been around for a while and also for what it can do. It can do almost anything you want it to do.

We've reduced testing time by about 70%. We had a regression suite that took the team literally two and a half weeks to get through. And once all the tests were automated, it literally takes us 16 hours to run through all the tests.

It's more than 70%. But the reason why I say 70% is that not all the tests could be run from beginning to end. There are some parts of the application that we had to kick off separately. But mostly all the automation could run within 24 hours, including all your regression. There are still tests where our users have to go out and manually test to make it 70%. But for the most part, we took a two and a half week process and we cut it down to almost two days of automation if kicked off Monday night. So it's pretty awesome.

The one team that I had integrated the solution on does not even need a tester. That's what Eggplant is, Eggplant is never sick, it runs all the time. It's never late. It is probably one of the best tools on the market for GUI automation.

In terms of what could be improved, I would love to be able to take the font of the application that the team is working in and upload it or import it into Eggplant Functional, so that the OCR is more accurate when it comes to that type of font. Because sometimes when you get into legacy applications where the fonts get a little wonky, they look really old, so a 1 could get mistaken for just an L. So I would love to have that part where it could read fonts that you import into it a lot easier for the OCR.

Additionally, there is some stuff around images they need to tighten up. Sometimes it has a hard time finding fuzzy images. I couldn't really tell you what they need to brush up on with the images. But for the most part, it's on point. I would like the company to have a dummy desktop application that they could send or download from the site that you could run Functional against. One of the biggest hurdles we had to go over was when we got Functional and installed it - what do we use it against? We did not really have an application. So we had to just write automation against the calculator or write automation against Notepad or Microsoft Excel.

It was kind of lost on some people. They would say, "Well, this is stupid. I actually want to see this being utilized against something that looks like an application." So I wish the company would come up with a dummy desktop application, something that doesn't require admin privileges. Just a little lightweight MSI file or RPM that you could put onto the machine that just has weird dropdowns or windows or buttons that you can click on just to test stuff against them. Something like that would be good.

It's stable. I'm serious. It's very stable. Now on the Linux side, it gets a little... I think they need to update the Linux. I think it's kind of an outdated Java Swing application, it almost gives you the impression that the application was written in Java Swing. Maybe they need to update the GUI part for JavaFX. There are some times when you're working with multiple sets and clicking in and out of it and you go to click in the text box and it gives you that straight line that kind of looks like a weird "I," because it's meant for you to put that in between letters - well it never switches off of that. So that becomes your mouse curser when you're working in Functional and it gets kind of lost.

So there is some wonky stuff around the Linux side of Functional. The little Eggy box in the corner doesn't always work when you double click on the the Eggy icon and Functional never really pops up. That's because there's another application that is actually sitting on top of it so it won't bring it to the front because something is in front of it. I've already sent it off to Eggplant, but they've got some wonky stuff with the Linux side. And unfortunately, with the company I work with, we do everything with Linux. But for the most part, it's very stable. We don't run into issues with memory leaks or it not loading or taking too much resources or something like that. It is pretty on point.

I would say it's the dog's bollocks when it comes to that. It's awesome.

There has been a question in my mind about the log files, but in the time that I've been working with Eggplant, I've never seen the log files ever get bloated or out of sort, never been an issue. So maintenance is not an issue. That's the only thing I could think of that you would run into, but I have not. It's a pretty sturdy application. They've got it figured out. The company has been around for 15 plus years. I think they have the maintenance side of things down. And they recently merged with Keysight. And Keysight will also probably bring stuff in that will add to it. Like I said, the application is pretty top shelf, it works.

My impressions of the scalability are that it is top shelf.

I can tell you how many people that I have integrated it with in the company, I would say thousands. Our company is worldwide, and Eggplant is used throughout the company and in multiple facets. The team that I'm currently working with has 14 testers right there. And if you throw the devs in, that's 20 devs that are using it. Then you're looking at 34, not counting the previous team of 10, so that's 44. The team before that was five. Let's round it up to 50 people that I've interacted with just on that alone. But Eggplant is used across the company, so I'd have to say a thousand plus. You could talk to Keysight and ask them how many people use it at Northrop Grumman and they could give you a number.

We have plans to increase the usage. I'll probably integrate it into the next team I go to. I'm kind of the unofficial spokesman slash salesman for Eggplant. That's my job, basically working in test automation. I'm an automation engineer and it's phenomenal for the turnover rate that you can turnover tests with. If the next team I go to are all developers and they brought me in to integrate a GUI automation solution, and the team doesn't have a lot of money, then maybe we'd have to go with a cheaper solution. But I've been fortunate to land on teams where they have the budget for that. Let's be honest, Eggplant isn't cheap.

It is different in terms of government contracting versus the private sector. They have reps for private sector versus government contracting. And the reps that I've always worked with for the government that have been assigned to our company have been on point, they're great. Now the ones that just came on who replaced the previous ones are not as good as the previous ones, but they'll get there. They're new. You don't ever judge somebody's beginning with somebody else's end. So honestly, the tech support is still top shelf.

It would be a 9.5. 9.8 out of 10.

In terms of Eggplant Manager, I do and I don't have experience with it. I have never used it but I know how to use it. I know what it is. But a lot of the teams at my company utilized Manager in a different way. They utilize a manager type of Eggplant in a different way. They use Jenkins to do the backend stuff, like the overnight running of tests. Manager schedules my tests to run at this time of night against an application. I've told them the sophomore teams I've been on about Manager and they say they already have a tool that does that and they can just run it from Jenkins. So really, the only part of Eggplant that I've ever really used is Functional, but I am aware of how DIA and Manager work. It would be cool to have those tools for a team that doesn't have Jenkins set up to see how they would want to use it, if they're really limited. It is a nice tool, but you're going to end up paying for it.

In terms of initial setup, unfortunately my deployment process was all Linux based. So I actually had to reach out to the network admins to set up the environments for it. But the deployment process getting it installed was not a big deal. We did have to jump through hoops to get it connected to the SUT, which is where your System Under Test sits.

It took a day. But that was with someone who wasn't familiar with VNC and wasn't quite sure how to set it up. If you had a network admin that knew what he was doing, it'd probably take the same amount of time as the Windows. It's just changing a couple things, setting a configuration file and you'd be off and running.

Most of the teams that I have integrated it on are only interested in the Functional part, because they only want the automation solution for the GUI. We never really scratched the surface on the DIA or the Manager part of Eggplant. I never really worked with a web team that had to utilize Eggplant Performance, mostly just Functional. The integration of it, the Windows end of it, is actually super easy. When you get into the Linux end, when you have to set up VNC, you have to have someone who is knowledgeable of how to run, create, and set up VNC connections and stuff like that. It is way more technical on the Linux side. But the RDP end is actually really good, it's really easy. I think if you have a Windows environment and you're connecting to a set that is on a Windows environment, and we lived in a perfect world, that install would only took a minute. You could be up and running within two minutes.

We did see a massive return on investment from using Eggplant. The previous team puffed their chest that they don't have to hire a tester on staff. So that's 60,000, 75,000 easily in their pocket that they can go spend on something else. And some teams have three or four testers. So you have Eggplant, which at our company is basically $2,500 a pop for key, because we get it so cheaply because there are so many out there. They only needed five licenses on the team. It's not hard to do the math on five times 2,500 versus five times 75,000. You're making money all day long with that. So ROI is huge because it replaces a tester. It frees up time for other things, so it's a massive ROI.

Eggplant is expensive. What makes it cheap for us is that in the company where I work, the more people that use it, the cheaper the licenses get. So it's kind of a deal in a way, the more you buy, the cheaper they are.

To put it in perspective, if we think about it, their support is actually wrapped into the cost. So you can call and talk to them any time of day and they aren't going to send you a bill for it. Whereas, Katalon or QF-test, or SmartBear, like TestComplete, will send you a bill. They'll send you a bill at the end of the week. You call them up for a support issue, they'll bill you. But their install and product are pretty cheap. Katalon, TestComplete and QF-test are cheap tools, but their support doesn't come cheap, they'll stick you on it.

Let's just put it into perspective. We had a team that didn't go through our company to get the licenses. They went through Eggplant to purchase the license and they purchased Manager as well. Functional for one year is $16,000. I don't know what that is in Quid or Pounds, but it's a lot. So now they added Manager and all that, and I think for one or two licenses with DIA and Manager, it ended up being $45,000 for two licenses, for a year.

My advice is to make sure you have the budget for it. That's the only advice. It just goes with technology. Would you buy Beats headphones or would you buy some headphones at the gas station or the petrol station down the street? You'd probably go for the Beats, right? You'd probably go there because it's what you get. The money you pay is what you get, it's that type of investment. Here's the thing, Eggplant is pretty awesome. It is the best tool out there. TestComplete can still do the same thing, but with TestComplete, you've got to have junior developers for it. You can get it cheaper, but if you have some developers that know how to write object oriented languages, then you could step in and be very effective with it. QF-test and Katalon are cheap software. But at the same time, they have a learning curve that requires calls to their support. And then their support will bill you in the end so it's money out of your pocket.

When you go into GUI automation, you have to ask yourself, "How much money do I have and what is the best return on an investment that I'm going to get?" I have to say that if you don't have a lot of money, then maybe QF-test or Katalon would be your way to go. And you're still looking for a GUI solution. If you have developers that are skilled, then maybe you go with TestComplete or you step into Appium or Selenium, depending on your application.

There is a tool for everything, but there's one tool that rules them all. And I have to say that it's Eggplant. I'm not going to lie, Eggplant is not only a tool for people that don't know what they're doing with automation it is also a tool for developers, because I've seen developers pull it right out of the box and slay it on the first five minutes. Like, "Oh. Yeah, I know how to do this." 

On a scale of 1 to ten, I would give Eggplant Functional a 10 out of 10, even with some of the issues. Like I said, it's the dog's bollocks. It's what I would pick every time if the finances and everything were there, boom, all the time, any day, every day.

The primary reason that we got Eggplant Digital Automation Intelligence is that we have a couple of systems that are run through virtual machines. Everybody who uses it in our company needs to go through a virtual machine. This solution was the only testing system that was able to run that virtual machine and test within it. It was the best that we found.

What we're mostly testing are web pages and Windows apps; Oracle transportation systems. They could have done local installs, but they put them in VMware and this was the best way to test them.

In a lot of the systems that I test, I don't have a real way to do full end-to-end testing. I don't have a way to set up data nicely, watch it flow through the system, give expected results and get to a final answer, and then clean everything up. It's very piecemeal. That's not necessarily why we got Eggplant. But what I have been able to do with it are a lot of smoke tests, which we didn't have, and several others. There are also some look-up screens where we set up look-up values for other areas, and we have been able to do full testing on those. We have actually found some errors in one application, errors that have gone into the backlog, and we hope to get those fixed so that we can keep building out more tests. It has enabled true end-to-end testing. So far, we've been able to get Eggplant to test anything that we've wanted to test.

Even with the mobile app, which consumes data from a different system, we'll be able to do some full testing within that, which is great.

Our use cases are somewhat unique, because we're not a software development shop. We are testing the pieces that we can and, for that purpose, Eggplant has helped. It has been great.

The model-based test automation has helped to reduce the test maintenance process. Now, I don't have to do a lot of the simple smoke tests and some other testing.

And while I wouldn't say that the solution has helped to uncover critical bugs that normal testing would have completely missed, it certainly has helped us find bugs and then verify that they've been fixed. In one particular instance, it found out that the continuous integration pipeline was broken, or that somebody forgot to push out all of the correct files, because pages weren't working. It pointed out that there was an issue with the deploy model.

I have really come to like Eggplant. Although I'm working in QA now, I worked as a dev for a very long time and I like the solution's scripting language, SenseTalk. It's pretty easy to use.

I also like the IDE and the helpers that it gives when you search something and double-click it. It gives you the outline that you can then fill out in your code, which is very similar to many others. I appreciate that they're doing that.

What I'm also really happy about—and perhaps this isn't technically about functional testing, but it's related to it—is that DAI's newest release allows us to test via scripts rather than models, because we have done 95 percent of our development in functional, not through modeling. I am really happy that then we can use the controller to run scripts rather than having to translate things to models. There are lots of options.

We have mobile apps that we are testing through it with Android Gateway, and that seems to be working great. And, of course, any web apps and Windows applications have been no problem. We are running several scrum lines, and we've just implemented with QA and, therefore, QA is important. What we're trying to do is get the ongoing suite of tests that look at things currently, and then it will be a built-on regression suite as we keep going and keep adding more and more tests. We want to improve quality before handing it off to our customers. If we have mainframe stuff, it's nothing that I've had to test or deal with. 

It's been very fast and very easy to use. Because there's that code behind it, we're able to write modularized code, so that when a new page is created, we don't have to rewrite everything, just the things that are specific to those pages.

The IDE could be even more full-featured. Because I was a developer, I was very spoiled by either Visual Studio Code or Visual Studio for shortcuts. For example, I was able to say "ctor" and hit Tab and it would create a template of a constructor for me. Or I was able to quickly type out a class mod with properties and methods using prop and hitting Tab. It would set up the template for me. It would be great, when I want to create a new function, if there were shortcut commands like those that help create all of the functions, or if there were shortcut features to do any of the complex plans. 

I would also like to see some of the syntax updated. They have the equivalent of a switch, but it's a very weird IF statement syntax. That could definitely be improved.

Another area that I would like them to improve is their database connectivity and ability within a database. Still, we've been able to use it with what they have and get it working.

I have been using Eggplant Digital Automation Intelligence for about 14 months.

I can't think of any problems. It's been stable for me.

In terms of scalability, since I'm writing functions, it's as fast as I can write them.

About eight months ago, we were going to have a fourth person work on it. They didn't want to get an extra license so we were having to work around the fact that we only had three licenses, but potentially four people working on it. However, given our setup, I could see that it would be easy to add another license if that's what we truly needed and get somebody up and running fairly quickly.

The roles of our users are two QA people and one intern. What they're doing is very similar to what I'm doing. The intern is working closely with me, doing a lot of the tests that I just haven't had time for. On our website we have four sub-domains. I would start the intern on the basics and then she would be able to completely write all of the smoke tests at least, and the basic code tests for that, no problem.

The other QA is the person who is using it through the VM because of the need for the Oracle system. He's also been using that for full integration testing, setting up data, verifying that it goes through, and that it gets the expected result at the end. He's also the one who is working on performance. He wants to start having the equivalent of hundreds of users hitting it to see how well our systems do.

In terms of maintenance of the solution, I handle all the DAI upgrades on the server as needed, but there isn't a lot of maintenance involved. I believe there are three updates a year. It's just a matter of letting everybody know how to redownload and install it. I've updated DAI once and it went very smoothly and worked well. I have a weekly meeting with one of their technical people and for the DAI update I said to them, "Hey, here's my plan," and made sure that it looked good to them, but I was the one who enacted it.

In terms of general runtime and being able to do whatever we need to do, anything that we have wanted to do for our tests, we've been able to get Eggplant to do it for us. We have mainly gotten some smoke and other automated tests going. We want to ramp up with more of those, but the area that we really need to expand into is reporting. Management is going to want some better reports than we've been giving them but we just haven't had time to look at that aspect, because we have wanted to keep going with the tests, first and foremost. We give them a little "okay," or we give them numbers, rather than providing actual reports. We do want to get to that eventually because I know the solution has that capability.

We have emailed their tech support and they have been absolutely fine. They have usually responded within a day. If needed, I can jump onto a Microsoft Teams call and work directly with their tech support to get problems solved.

Before Eggplant, what we had been doing was C# programming in Visual Studio using Selenium, Gherkin, and Cucumber against Chrome, which is our preferred browser. The reason we went with Eggplant was that we had to use a VM to get to a lot of the products that we use internally, to help test them. The ability to test in virtual machines was huge.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was just a matter of installing the solution locally. It took longer on our side because we had to get a dedicated server, but once we had that server, setting up the license manager on it was very straightforward. Putting in new licenses for it when they expired, until we got our permanent ones, was quite easy. I had no problems with any part of the setup or in running it.

For the third person on the team who's been using it, the biggest issue has been permissions. She's not a developer like the other two are, so she doesn't have local admin permissions. We've just had to go through help desk at times, but otherwise it's been very easy.

Our implementation strategy is that we want to get it up and running and to get scheduled tests and their results. That's what we're working towards. We're hoping to generate some sort of report, whether it's a CSV or something along those lines, to see the daily scheduled test-run results.

We're still in the process of setting up ROI metrics. The last number that I saw is that we probably have 200 scripts running. We're trying to get them on a daily schedule, and that is about three hours of testing that we don't have to do, and that's per day. Every day it does the regression testing and we know if we have any problems.

In terms of deployment of the solution, we have an internal server in a private cloud running the licensing machine and we have three dev licenses for the product as well as two run-time licenses.

The development license allows you to run Eggplant Digital Automation Intelligence and allows you to test it and run your script. The runtime license is what is used when you set up a schedule. All it needs is a run-time license to run the executables and run the tests. But since you don't need the full Eggplant Digital Automation Intelligence Functional IDE, you just need the run-time license.

The other QA in our organization was looking at a testing product called Ranorex. After they fully understood what it was he was trying to do, they're the ones who said that Eggplant is probably the best solution for that.

Jump in and try it. Don't be afraid of it. Before COVID, Eggplant would train a client for two weeks onsite and then everything would be handled through tech support. Not that the worldwide pandemic was good, but because of COVID we started getting a weekly meeting with one of their tech people, and that has been awesome. He's been a great resource. We go through scripts with him, we can send him something and he can respond back via email. But we also have face time where we can say, "Hey, I tried this, it didn't work," and we can sit there and work together through the issue and figure it out.

Utilize all the resources and play around with it. It's not a simple system, but it's worth learning the details of it because you're going to get so much more out of it.

If someone were to say to me, "We are not comfortable with automating 70 percent of our linear path," that would be fine with me, because I'm not trying to sell anything. But I would point out to them that, by having a robust regression suite that they can run and that they can rely on, they are going to free up their testers to be able to work on the edge cases or the strange business issues. They will be available for all of the manual testing that is either too complex or consists of one or two things that just change often enough that they're difficult to automate. It lets their people then focus on those things rather than just the basics of whether or not the code was released properly or files were forgotten.

The team that I'm on mainly works with web pages. I don't actually have to worry about the stuff that we got Eggplant for. It just so happens that I can also use it to test our web pages. We are not a software development company, we're a transportation company. With a lot of the different tools that we have, what our in-house developers have often done is translate data or move data in file form between databases. Sometimes, the front-end web pages, for example, might end up being a report, or they might verify that customer data has gone in, or they verify fuel prices for comparison to what we paid and to see if we can do better.

Eggplant is not worked into our development cycle. It's a tool that I use to automate tests, but it's not something that we've used in a way that would help accelerate the release of a major enterprise-wide upgrade.

We don't use the solution's AI-driven automated exploratory testing. If we let it loose on our website, it would find a lot of dead ends because if data pages are not updated, and they can't upload that, they can't really go any further. Even if they could upload a couple of files, that requires going off to other systems in the background for testing, and some of it doesn't even go back to a main interface directly. That's not to say that maybe someday we wouldn't work in the model area, but at the moment I personally have been more comfortable and happy to work within the functional model.

Being a developer, the solution has reinforced a lot of my development skills. In the context of the programming acronym SOLID, it is still possible to use programming skills and to make sure that you are writing small snippets of reusable code. It has also shown that QA isn't just manual testing anymore. There's a very big automated component and you really do need people who either want to be developers or are able to develop, because that is what is required now. It's what allows you to make better, more robust tests, and things that can either recover or give you good data on how your systems are performing.

We use Eggplant for robotic process automation across several use cases. We primarily use it to test television set-top boxes, and we also use it for some automated content matching and for over-the-top streaming device testing as well.

The automation and the testing that we perform with eggplant is really for automation that allows us to generate data via our products, to validate that the data being generated is what we expect. Our primary use cases are for post-development, operational validation and support.

We were performing tests on television set-top boxes manually. It would take a person anywhere from 90 minutes to over three hours to perform a given test. It would require them to sit in front of a computer screen and manually perform the test operations. Not only was it resource-intensive, but it resulted in inaccuracies because the tests require certain channel changes or activities to be performed on a set-top box with particular timings. Since there were humans performing the tests, the timing was not always accurate. And there would be issues with missed button pushes. Eggplant allowed us to replace that human work with an automated solution that reduced the time that it took a person to perform the test from upwards of three hours down to a few minutes. It also increased the accuracy to the levels where we are entirely accurate with our timing and tests. We now have an extremely precise and extremely accurate level of testing.

It enables true end-to-end testing of processes that span a wide range of devices and architectures. We have used it for several different scenarios and devices. We use it for automating processes on our products, our company's products are primarily SaaS-type products, and we're able to develop automation that works on our entire suite of products across all of our implementations.

It has also helped to uncover critical bugs that our normal testing would have completely missed. By performing the automated tests that we do, we've been able to perform many more tests than we would have done manually. By being able to cover that much more ground, the tests have resulted in discovering issues that we likely wouldn't have discovered before. We've been able to perform both a broader and deeper level of tests.

The testing that we're doing with Eggplant is in operations, a post-implementation type of validation. The information that we uncover from our tests is used as a feedback loop to our internal technical teams and to our external data partners, allowing them to investigate and resolve the issues that they may have in their production systems. The results of our tests are used to identify potential issues with our data partners' data. They are also used to evaluate the data that we generate in our systems, and those results are fed back to our teams. They take the results of our automated tests and use them to apply fixes and upgrades to our existing systems. We're able to inform our internal and external partners and, in turn, have them improve and stabilize their platforms.

The feature that we use most is the optical character recognition. The features that we like the most are the developer interface and the ability to quickly develop and deploy tests.

Although the solution enables you to test any software on any device, from mainframe to browser to mobile, our primary use for Eggplant is robotic process automation. We're not using Eggplant for its original software testing purposes. But we have found that, for all of the devices that we need to use Eggplant for, such as Rokus and Fire TVs, we've been able to use it and have not run into any issues.

If one area could be improved, it would be some of their documentation. In particular, some of their online help and user support documentation is a little bit out of date and could be revised and updated on a more frequent basis. Other than that, I haven't really found any issues or problems.

We have been using Eggplant Digital Automation Intelligence for seven years.

I'm very impressed with the stability of the solution. I haven't found any issues there.

I also haven't found any issues as far as scalability goes. We've expanded the usage from our original use case and have quadrupled the utilization, at least, across some other use cases within our organization. We're always looking for areas where we could expand and continue to grow our use of Eggplant.

I currently have five people using the solutions and they're all data analysts.

Their customer support is really impressive. I would rate them a nine out of 10.

We did not have a previous solution.

The initial setup was very straightforward. To get our first use case working in production, it took a matter of days, perhaps a week.

We had a specific use case that we were trying to address. We had an already defined scope of manual testing that we were performing. So our strategy was to identify the first test candidate, by starting with testing of devices that were housed internally, within our building and within our testing lab. We implemented that and validated that the Eggplant software was working as expected on those and then we rolled out the testing to external devices and additional use cases after that.

Deployment and maintenance of Eggplant are done by one person in total, and that is divided between a manager of the analysts and myself.

We did it all ourselves.

We've reduced the costs involved in performing the tests that we perform, taking a person from hours down to minutes to perform a test. That has translated directly into return on investment, both in overall cost savings to perform the tests and in our ability to do much more with less.

Depending on your use cases, it's prudent to look around at some other solutions if you feel there are others that offer similar features. If you choose Eggplant, you should evaluate how you're going to use it and make a smart decision about the number of developer- and execution-only licenses you purchase to maximize your budget. We found that going heavier on execution-only licenses has been a way to reduce our costs and maximize our ability to benefit from the software.

Beyond the standard licensing fees there is just the cost of the resources it takes to do the work of utilizing Eggplant. And that is much better than the alternative of manual testing. There are almost negligible hardware costs. We have Eggplant running on commodity workstations that aren't anything special or expensive. I wouldn't consider it a significant expense to host it.

We did not evaluate other solutions. We chose Eggplant because they had some documentation and online information that I found during my research that was very specifically geared towards my use case. I found out very quickly how easily and how well it worked to solve the problem that I had. I didn't feel that it warranted any further research.

My advice would be try it before you buy it. They offer a trial copy and you have plenty of time to build some prototypes. The speed at which you can actually be up and running is great, so that during the trial period you can very quickly find out how well the solution is going to meet your needs. See if you can build a prototype that meets your needs quickly and if you can do that, then you're going to be in good shape.

We use the basic, core functionality of Eggplant Digital Automation Intelligence, where we develop tests in the user interface and usually execute them via the command line. We're developing those tests manually to serve our needs. We've had some exploratory sessions on the solution's AI features and that's something that I'm sure we'll be diving into further in the near future. But we have been able to meet most of our needs with the more core functions of the software.

If someone who is not using Eggplant said to me, “We are comfortable with automating 70 percent of our linear paths," I would say that we had a similar quote from our QA manager, seven years ago when I decided to look for a solution. The QA manager was satisfied with what was being done and didn't want to really put forth the effort to look for an additional or different solution from what he had. With a little bit of work, I was able to discover Eggplant as a solution and build a prototype and automate the work that was being done. It was very eye-opening to our company and was received very well. You're doing yourself a disservice if you're not constantly looking for better solutions and improvements in your current processes.

The biggest lesson that I've learned from using Eggplant Digital Automation Intelligence is that it pays to do your research and look for solutions. When you've got a use case or an issue that is presenting itself, do your research and find out what other people are doing and what else is out there that may help with solving the problem at hand. In most cases, you're not the only one who has that problem. Doing some research to see who's doing what and the experiences that others have had with the different solutions out there is a great way to find a good solution like Eggplant.

We've been using this product for quite a while and we've found that it's able to address the use cases that we throw at it. We haven't run into any situations that I'm aware of where we earmarked Eggplant for a solution but were unable to apply it.

We provide software for doctors and hospitals. In one of our business units, business analysts and quality assurance people are working together and there is no requirement in the job description for programming. These users are doing the tasks the doctors would do. In the testing environment, they don't need technical, medical knowledge. They are just testing the software in a process that mirrors how a doctor would behave, what a doctor would do for the patient.

Everything is happening on the layout or display that is used by the user. Eggplant prompts processes, like "click here," or "look for this image." Eggplant makes it possible for QA people and BAs, working in the actual display, to check if the software is providing the right images, the right text, and the right results. They don't have to go inside the code or to the TCP/IP layer. Everything is happening at the highest level. You don't need much coding knowledge to program what can sometimes be complex processes.

Eggplant works very well when it comes to uncovering bugs. In many cases, it has revealed bugs in our tools and modules. That is great.

It has also helped to quickly stabilize updates. It has improved the whole process in acknowledging the images and texts that are shown. Everything is running even better than before.

In addition, it reduces and even eliminates test processes that might have otherwise been necessary for us to do as part of quality assurance. I didn't have to do those processes, Eggplant was doing them. For example, there was a formula used by doctors every day. For a human to check it would take eight hours, but Eggplant does it in two hours and 20 minutes. It's quicker.

We also get better quality because a human eye, after such long and concentrated work, can't see what could be very important images or very rare results. It just doesn't see them anymore, but Eggplant recognizes them. We had an example where a certain text was not Arial 12 but, instead, Arial 9. Human quality assurance people were not able to recognize that, but Eggplant recognized it and told us that something was wrong. We just activated Eggplant and it did the work for us. Eggplant has influenced our release schedules greatly. It showed us errors that we must not have when the doctors are working with our software in real life. It has definitely improved the quality of our software. Eggplant found all the errors before release and gave us the information we needed to look closer at some of our modules, and we improved the quality of our product as a result.

The digital twin tool is perfect for combining the non-technical and technical sides. Someone who is not actually in the code can understand the processes that are presented by digital twin. I was introduced to it with a short introduction of about one and a half hours, and I was very surprised to see something like that because I had only been working with Eggplant programming and coding. With digital twin I can program something and visualize it within a module, within a process. For us, an example of such a use case is creating a new patient.

These small use cases are visualized in actions. Everybody who looks at it can understand what is meant by the representation and what an action is doing. In the past, everything was programmed and nobody could understand what I was doing. I put things in modules and described them very clearly, but if somebody was going into the modules, there was code and nobody could understand what it was doing. Now, everybody knows, when clicking on the action, what is going on in the software.

I tell my colleagues, "Look people, when I'm gone, with digital twin, everybody who is working with me will know the actions and can use them and can create a whole process that is visualized, installed, and implemented in Eggplant." We need to understand each other from the first moment, when I'm coding something. That is what is possible with digital twin.

What I like the most in Eggplant Manager is the functionality where you are informed, via email, if something is wrong.

For the future, I would like to see standardized actions already built into Eggplant. For example, "wait eight seconds". That way, I wouldn't need to create it as an action. Right now, I have to program that wait and describe it as an action so that everybody knows it is an action that waits eight seconds. Another example would be a "while" process: while this variable is less than 100, for example, do X. That way, somebody who is not familiar with programming processes like "if-else", or "for", or "while", would be able, from the first moment, and without programming, to put some easy-to-use, standardized, actions in place. Eggplant is such a great tool, but everything is based on programming.

It would be nice to have something like Microsoft's automation tool has. That tool has pre-programmed use cases. Everybody who uses it the first time understands what is meant by the "wait" process. Everybody can get in and program. That is not possible right now in Eggplant. If somebody asks me, "Is it possible, from the first moment, that somebody who has never used Eggplant can create actions?" I must answer, "No, it is not possible." Currently, it requires teamwork where somebody programs the actions so somebody else can use them. Eggplant doesn't have standardized actions right now.

Also, the longer the code for a process is, the greater the possibility that Eggplant will not find, for example, the images we need it to find. My advice would be not to program 5,000 lines of code. Try to reduce it to 1,000. Eggplant works very well when it comes to finding the images that are required, but when there are more than 1,000 lines of code, there's a kind of delay in every network. I don't know if this is an Eggplant issue or not, because Eggplant works very intelligently, but eggplant waits for the next action. If a required image can't be found within one millisecond, Eggplant is already responding, "I haven't found anything." Although Eggplant has intelligence built-in, it needs more. The stability would grow if Eggplant did not give up in the first moment and, instead, continued to look for an image a little bit longer. There is a delay in every network environment. It would be great to implement some kind of process in Eggplant that allowed the system to wait longer and to communicate more with the system.

We have been using Eggplant Digital Automation for between three and four years.

Overall, the stability is good.

For us, scalability is related to the licensing cost problem. If you have only two licenses and can't afford a third one or a fourth one, the scalability is limited. In terms of the system itself, it's perfect. You can change and share a script, or processes, or actions. But you can't grow within a company when you're limited by the number of executable licenses because of the price.

There were occasions where I asked questions about coding and, within 15 minutes, I got answers. That was perfect. I wrote to support about every little process that stopped me and got the answer about coding within 15 minutes. Other questions that were a bit more complex needed more time and it took them 24 hours to resolve. Support reacted very quickly. This is a point in favor of Eggplant, one that I want to stress when trying to convince my new business unit to adopt Eggplant. Support reacts so quickly. The kind of communication they provide and their politeness make it perfect.

End-to-end testing isn't possible for us because of the licensing problems. It's very expensive, so we only have two development/execution licenses.

When I started programming in Eggplant, everybody who looked at my screen just saw a lot of code. But when I activated it by pressing play, and that code was working in the background and started doing all the tests that a human would do, everybody said, "Hey, Eggplant is doing it. Cool." Everybody liked it. But the processes behind that, which needed to be programmed, was the part nobody liked.

Right now, I'm totally convinced about Eggplant, and I try to convince others in my company about it. There are some other tools I have to evaluate, and to give my opinion about, but no doubt Eggplant will still be my favorite.

We did a POC using Eggplant Digital Automation Intelligence where we did the model testing and used DI agents.

We use the Eggplant Digital Automation Intelligence for one of our desktop applications where there are graphs, such as PowerPoints and Spotify dashboards. There are some graphs in which we would like to evaluate the data from the tool. First, we have to validate the data from the back end, and then take the value coming from the back end and cross-validate from the graphs. Additionally, we have to edit the PDF files. We use Eggplant Digital Automation Intelligence for validation.

This solution has helped our organization because we can create test cases faster as compared to using Selenium. There are no language dependencies and people are not required to be trained for two to five months. People can write test cases using Eggplant Digital Automation Intelligence. Using the solution has improved productivity from using Selenium.

The most valuable features of Eggplant Digital Automation Intelligence are bug hunting and OCR technology.

Eggplant Digital Automation Intelligence could improve by lowering the price.

I have been using Eggplant Digital Automation Intelligence for approximately two years.

Eggplant Digital Automation Intelligence is a stable solution.

The scalability of the solution is good, we did not encounter any problems.

We have certified people in our company using this solution.

We want to increase our usage in the future, but at this time we are able to deliver our objectives.

The support from Eggplant Digital Automation Intelligence is supportive of any issue we have had. You only need to raise a request, and they'll help. They can schedule a call to understand the use case and can help resolve it. The customer support is good.

I rate the support a nine out of ten.

Positive

We have used multiple different tools. We choose the one that fits the use case the best.

When I compare Eggplant Digital Automation Intelligence to Selenium, the bug hunting, and OCR technology features are good in Eggplant Digital Automation Intelligence.

The initial setup of Eggplant Digital Automation Intelligence is easy. However, you required a person who will guide you on how to install it and everything else. Once you understand then you don't require anyone to help you going forward.

They have their own documentation and customer support that can help you to download everything. Once you have an understanding then you can independently download and use it.

If you compare it with other functionalized automation tools, it's easy. However, some understanding is required to write the test cases.

We had some assistance at the beginning of the implementation.

We have received a return on investment.

Eggplant Digital Automation Intelligence is based on user licenses. Other similar tools use different types of licensing models. 

This solution is expensive when compared to the market. However, the reason it is more expensive is because of its stability, high performance, and for its support of any technology.

There are no additional costs other than the licensing.

We did not evaluate other options because we knew that for desktop applications, and for the legacy technology we have this solution was the best. 

This solution supports any technology and we did not want to invest our time to crosscheck with other tools. We knew this solution can meet our needs and this is why we choose it.

Eggplant Digital Automation Intelligence is the market leader in AI automation. They independently worked across every technology.

My approach while identifying the tool to use is simple. If you want to see the performance, and you want to improve productivity, then it would be best to choose the commercial tool. If you don't want to improve productivity and want to stay on the same line, it is best to use an open-source solution, such as Selenium. Selenium requires skilled people to use it. Which is very difficult to find in the market at this time. Additionally, it requires a lot of time for maintenance. To reduce all these costs, you should choose a commercial tool. 

My advice to others is to understand the solution very well. Understand your use cases and try to fit them. It is important to see whether your use cases fit into the tool which you are looking for and based on that you can go ahead and use it.

I rate Eggplant Digital Automation Intelligence an eight out of ten.

I usually use this to make UI tests. Our company makes an application, a mobile application, and in order to confirm the functionality, I usually use this product for regression or function testing.

The recording feature is very helpful. I also like the scripting functionality.

It is easy to set up.

The language is too specific; it is just for Eggplant. If they could offer a variety of languages, such as Java or Python, that it would be more helpful. I cannot use Java or Python in Eggplant. I want to use the other languages in Eggplant.

The solution is a bit heavy and can be hard on my laptop.

I've been using the solution for a year.

The solution is very heavy, so sometimes my laptop, when I use it, stops and I have to link with it again. It may be due to the fact that it is a recording tool.

We haven't tried to scale. In my company, we made applications just for Android and iOS. I use just those functions. I use just small kinds of functions.

The limit of Eggplant is, due to the specific language, the scalability is not good. For example, Selenium supports many languages, including Java, Java script, or Python and so on, however, Eggplant doesn't support other languages. 

We have between ten and 20 users of the solution right now. There may be other teams and users at other offices in other countries. 

There is a health service in the Eggplant tool. When I have a problem, for example, with the latest version of the iOS, I send them an email and then they answer me and provide a solution. I have to send them logs from my computer and then the other things. The team is generally good. they are helpful.

I'm interested in automation and API testing, so our company uses tools like Eggplant and Selenium and also SoapUI, and then Postman.

These days I use only Eggplant since it is very easy to use, especially in the function test, and in the UI test. It's better than other tools. 

When I install the Eggplant, they cannot service or support the latest version of iOS. That said, they have had very little time to update their application. In general, it is very easy. The setup process is better than another application.

There's another team that handles the maintenance. 

The solution was set up in-house. 

I'm not sure of the exact version number I'm using. 

Their website is really good, and there is so much information on their website. They have many examples, and then there are many ways to solve problems. There are tutorials for every level of user. Before you buy the tool, you can watch the lectures, and then you can ask them for a POC. For us, they sent us the pilot tools for weeks or months. If you are skilled in UI or function testing, you can try it out.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

Our primary use case of Eggplant was for test automation for vulnerability scanning. We were making sure certain things were installed and in place; dates, scanning certain texts to make sure that what it was looking for matched in terms of dates and version numbers, things like that. This solution is software as a service. I'm a senior technical support analyst.

The difference was that rather than dealing with each machine individually, we could literally just click a start or script run and do what was required. The automation saved a lot of time and effort.

I love a good portion of this solution, the stand outs for me are the ability to read texts, and being able to automate anything you wish to do. If I wanted to go on YouTube and load up a specific video and have it take a certain image that appears on the screen, I can do it - it's pretty amazing, pretty cool.

The biggest issue I had was the crashing. You could be in the middle of setting up and writing up a nice little script and then it would crash. It was a common occurrence and frustrating but we handled it.

In the time that I used Eggplant, the software crashed quite a few times. Otherwise it was stable. There were some things we had to work around such as waiting for the computer to start up and adding personal credentials. Maybe there was a way for batch scripting to be integrated that might have helped. 

I'm pretty sure it's scalable but I've never thought of it in those terms. We had two or three hands-on users who worked with Eggplant on a daily basis; we were all working on testing. 

I never contacted technical support. We had our own in-house personnel that assisted us when needed. 

There were seven or eight people involved in the deployment. I don't recall the timeframe but it did take some time. 

If you're trying to automate something you do on a daily or monthly basis, I would recommend this solution. But if it's something that you want to do right now, one time and only one time, then it's not a suitable solution.

I rate the solution nine out of 10. 

We use it for desktop applications. We are using its latest version, and it can be deployed on-premises as well as on the cloud.

Its scalability is good. It is useful for desktop applications, and it also uses OCR and does image recognition.

Its performance and stability could be better.

I have been using this solution for about a year.

Its stability could be better.

It is easily scalable. We have about seven users who are using this solution. We don't have any plans to increase its usage.

Their support is okay.

It is difficult. You need some kind of training. Its implementation took some time. It took about one to two weeks.

We didn't implement it ourselves. We needed some consultancy.

It probably has a yearly license.

I would recommend it based on the project. I would rate it a six out of 10.