IF you are looking for api testing solution along with service virtualization, then look no further than this tool. This tool also forces you to move your testing lifecycle to much earlier phases of development which helps overall SDLC.
When you have to test the UI and how it behaves when certain actions are performed, you need something that can automate the browsers. This is where Selenium comes to the rescue. If you have to test APIs and not the frontend (UI), I would recommend going with other libraries that support HTTP Requests. Selenium is good only when you have no choice but to run the steps on a browser.
It immensely helps to change your entire testing lifecycle approach and to implement Shift Left approach with the extensive emphasis on testing the api's.
This is a great tool to implement Service virtualization for your and/or third-party web services. This will ensure we have 100% environment availability and consistency for automation and performance test environments.
This tool also helps you with test data setup and management which is a very crucial piece of test automation.
It also helps us to implement performance testing for apis using the Blazemeter.
This tool comes with a license cost and not free. Many open source tools offer free api testing solution and so making some functionality of this tool as open source would be good
Load testing piece is not integrated with in the tool and rather uses Blaze meter which is free.
Some integration with UI and api testing will make this tool even more attractive
Selenium is pretty user-friendly but sometimes tests tend to flake out. I'd say roughly one out of twenty tests yields a false positive.
Selenium software cannot read images. This is a minor negative because a free plug-in is available from alternate sources.
Slowness may be a minor factor with Selenium, though this is an issue with basically any testing software since waiting on a site to execute JavaScript requires the browser to wait for a particular action.
We love this product mainly because of its high customization abilities and the ease of use. Moreover, its free and can be learned easily through online communities and videos. The tests are more consistent and reliable as compared to Manual tests. It has enabled us to test a large number of features all in one go, which would have impossible through manual tests. The reports generated at the end of the tests are really helpful for the QA and the development teams to get a fair view of the application.
As I mentioned earlier, the reason I use Selenium is because there is a fairly widespread community of users, and user support services are at a good level. because the application is open source, it works on many platforms (Windows, Linux, IOS) without any problems. In addition, it gives us a lot of options for writing functional tests. For errors that we receive through the application, we can easily find the reasons for errors in the forums.
Selenium does not have technical support available easily. You have to go through forums to get the information you need. However, there are excellent forums out there that make it easy to troubleshoot. The open-source flexibility makes it difficult to have dedicated support.
We did everything we needed to use it. Now we can execute our tests on different operational systems and browsers running few tests simultaneously. We also implemented Appium framework to execute our tests on mobile devices, such as iPhones, iPads, Android phones and tablets. We use SauceLabs for our test execution and Jenkins for continuous integration.
It definitely is among the top leaders in API testing and virtualization along with the Parasoft SOA tool. Many open source API testing libraries such as Rest Assured, Karate and even Postman and SOAP UI are free which is a little bit against CA.
At the time of adoption, there were not many other alternatives that were even close to being competitive when it comes to browser testing. As far as I know now to this day, there is still little competition to Selenium for what it does. Any other browser-based testing still utilises Selenium to interact with the browser.
This tool gave a very positive ROI in our group. Especially with service virtualization where we minimized the downtime in our test environments significantly.
Also, service virtualization helps to minimize the costs of hitting third party services often in lower environments.
