Keeping up with newest trends in software development can be difficult sometimes. We can hardly imagine any other industry that is so dynamic.

This review is dedicated to those who are responsible for testing our projects, the ones who find our bugs before they hit production. We want to help them, by making their life a little bit easier. 😀

Sadly, we’re already in 2018 and a lot of peers are still reluctant when it comes to trying out new tricks and tools that might speed up their workflow.

-No, I’ll write my own tests from scratch and I’m going to use Java.

Testing has changed a lot in the last few years. The standard for 2013 was to write some tests in your favourite programming language by using the Selenium WebDriver API.

You would just throw those tests into your CI/CD system and let them run on a headless browser.

That strategy proved to be time-consuming and would often lead to unstable and unreliable tests.

How many times have you heard someone saying that their Automated Tests are a work-in-progress and they’re hoping to stabilise them in a few months?

How many times has someone looked into the code repo of the tests and spent countless hours while trying to figure out how it works?

How many times have you seen a nasty bug go into production because cross-browser testing wasn’t taken seriously enough?

Somewhere along the way, the weight and responsibility of Automated Testing has been automatically assigned to Software Testers, valuable specialists who are often not skilled or prepared to write code.

To make matters worse, they would find themselves pressured to avoid using enterprise solutions. Project Managers were concerned by the cost of such solutions, blindly ignoring the fact that the time consumed with writing tests from scratch would end up costing them way more.

-Sorry, we don’t have any funds for that. Just write it yourself.

A few years ago, an awful trend started that involved hybrid solutions made up of homemade Selenium WebDriver tests coupled with expensive cross-browser cloud providers such as BrowserStack or SauceLabs.

Not only did these solutions added to the overall complexity, but it also raised the cost.

Similar to how companies started migrating to Amazon Web Services from bare metal servers, a new and exciting trend has started where Automated Testing is being moved from overcomplicated Selenium WebDriver code to all-in-one cloud-based solutions.

These codeless solutions enable Software Testers to create stable and efficient Automated Tests, thus reducing the cost of testing and discovering bugs.

Endtest is a platform where users can create, manage and run Automated Tests for Web Applications, without having to write any code. You get a test editor where you can easily create your tests by using Actions such as Click, Write Text, Take Screenshot and many more.

This approach leads to having your steps in an organized fashion, similar to how you would write steps for describing a Manual Test.

You can locate your elements by using identifiers such as ID, Class Name, Text Inside, XPath, CSS Selector, Link Text, Partial Link Text.

After you’re done creating and editing your test, you can instantly run it on their cross-browser cloud infrastructure, where you can run it on real browsers, which are running on real Windows, Mac OS machines and mobile devices.

When the test is finished running, you even get a video recording, so you can see exactly what went wrong from a visual point of view.

You also get some cool features such as Screenshot Comparison and Email Notifications.

They even have an API, so it should be easy to integrate Endtest with your CI/CD system (Jenkins, TeamCity, etc).

2. Ghost Inspector is another awesome solution. Similar to Endtest, users can create, manage and run Automated Tests on their platform.

Each step is defined by an Operation and the user just has to add the parameters.

You can also use their recorder, which is an extension that can be installed on Chrome and Firefox.

An important issue with Ghost Inspector is that you’re limited to using only CSS Selectors as locators, which might results in brittle tests.

You can easily run your tests on their cloud infrastructure (Chrome and Firefox).

Sadly, they do not offer the possibility to run your tests on Mac OS or mobile devices.

I did use their solution at some point, but I didn’t stick to it because of an important limitation.

Your tests cannot run for longer than 10 minutes and this is a serious issue, since I need to have tests that will run for at least 40 minutes.

Their Documentation section is really useful and well written, I would recommend using the Free version from Ghost Inspector if you’re testing your own weekend projects.

Sadly, I gave up on writing reviews for the other solutions that I had in mind, because those solutions proved to be too slow or unstable.

I would like to see your opinions in the Comments section. 😀