I decided to use Selenium because I
like the freedom that you get with all the programming languages it
supports and because development is usually quicker than any other
testing tools I ever used!
I chose Selenium IDE as my first
open source automated tool. And then I worked with Selenium RC. And now
Selenium Webdriver. It's the best testing tool ever!!
I think QTP is sucks. Of course, QTP
fanboys will immediately jump up & down stating that I don't know how
to use QTP. On the contrary, I know exactly what I am talking about. Because
I've been a QTP Engineer for last 6 years. As of this writing, QTP still
does not support Mac OS X, and Linux, heck it still doesn't support Firefox 3.6! Are you
kidding me? Well, apart from HP's snail pace development process, I have other
problems with the tool itself. Like its really retarded scripting engine (which
uses vbscript), which does not provide you any real mechanism to maintain
frameworks. Another example - CreateObject("WScript.Shell") -
what do you think will happen if you used that in QTP? Any programmer who knows
vbscript, will say that it creates a wscript object but she'd be so wrong.
It rather creates a native windows shell automation object. WScript CreateObject()
is simply not supported in QTP as QTP scripting engine overrides WScript.
Let us get one thing straight -
Automation is programming, now let that sink in for a second...again -
automation is programming. If your automation tool does not provide a real good
programming interface, it is not fit for automation. Obviously in my books, QTP
falls way short of that goal. One of the statements I consistenly hear is -
"oh we don't have programmers in our automation team". If you cannot
see the fallacy in that statement, no one can help your team - not even QTP.
And of course, support from HP is bad too. Case in point - few month ago
our team encountered a bug in QTP 10 where it had memory allocation issues
& the workaround offered to us - "restart QTP after every 4 test
case runs". I am not joking.
QTP does few things
really good vis-a-vis record & playback (and they make it real simple
for non technical users). And that also includes support for various enterprise
applications both web based & win32. That means, they have to cover a
lot of territory before they can release something and that explains why
Windows 7 support is still lacking. But in your case, do you need Sharepoint
support on Windows 7? If all you're testing is your own web app, why do you
have to wait for HP to finish support for say Oracle enterprise apps? At this
juncture, the only reason your team is still sticking to QTP is either because
you have no real developers in your QA team and/or you have a lot of test cases
automated in QTP. The later is a pain initially to convert to something else,
but if you plan it out correctly you will save tons of headache in
future.
I could go on &
on about all that is wrong with QTP, but this article is not about that. This
article is about getting rid of QTP & using alternatives in place of it
to achieve a truly cross platform solution. After joining my current company,
one of my first goal was to do exactly that. And this article describes what we
did & how we did it.
To see a list of hotfixes that I
know of see:
http://www.sayem.org/2012/02/qtp-sucks-selenium-rules.html
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
One of the downsides of the internet is that it keeps iu-informed and out dated posts around to help propagate the the notion that change doesn't happen. Micro Focus (then HPE) has release LeanFT a few years back which support creating and replaying tests on Mac, Linux, and Windows. And if that wasn't enough, most QTP customers already have access to it. But as they say, "Wait their is more", you can choose to write your tests in Java, C# or Javascript and leverage popular frameworks such as Junit, Nunit, TestNG or even build frameworks such as Maven.
As I like to say #DiscoverTheNew.
And for disclosure, I am a Solutions Architect who has worked for Mercury, HP, HP Enterprise and now Micro Focus and have supported the functional testing tools since WinRunner.