TestComplete Enterprise Vs Selenium

One of the things that I absolutely love in all products originated from AutomatedQA (TestComplete, AQtime, AutomatedBuildStudio, discontinued AutomatedDockingLibrary, AQtrace and AQdevTeam) is the infrastructure provided by the tools. By the infrastructure I mean user-friendly logging, multy-user support, network features, data-driven testing and other things that you will have to implement by yourself with a lot of (if not for all of) free tools. Yes, a lot of mentioned functionality exists for Selenium as a separate components, but you will have to find them and integrate. Note that Selenium means Java with all its hell with components location and versioning.

One more thing: while you should not pay for Selenuim itself, the total cost of ownership (TCO) for commercial and 'free' products is usually the same. This statement well corresponds to my personal observations and opinion of other guys I talked with.

Why TestComplete? 



1) While I have a strong Development background many QA Testers do not.  TestComplete has a friendly user interface for the smart tester who lacks extensive dev skills.  They can step out tests and even layout Keyword tests, and I can help them write any extra scripts in the background if needed.

2) It plays nice with Visual Studio

3) It connects up to build/deploys easily

4) The site and forums are packed with answers to FAQs

5) The customer support is awesome

6) It does everything that Selenium does and definitely surpasses the Coded UI included with Visual Studio.

I have been using test complete for less than 1 month now, and I already have smoketests ready to roll.

Hi

One limitation of Selenium which is a show stopper for me is, as far as I can understand, you can't reattach to an open window (note the issue is closed Status:  NotFeasible).



https://code.google.com/p/selenium/issues/detail?id=18



I can't imagine how I would develop long running tests without this ability. I spend a lot of time in TC just running small stub functions with the web site under test in a particular state. It is easy for TC to just pick up the active browser and run with it in it's current state. To do the equivalent in Selenium you would have to rerun the navigation / interactions from scratch.

 

John

While it isn't free or open source, TestComplete does offer great features, it is scalable, it is established, it is robust and reliable, and it is very well supported by SmartBear Technical Support.

I welcome the newest integrations that are advertised in TC 10.5 and I am looking forward to start exerienting them. I agree with chris , my reason for staying with TestComplete when starting automation for a completely new product were very similar.

Beside other things, it allows us to combine experienced developers (but not testers)  with experienced testers (but not developers) to  produce a robust automated solution. 

CHRIS LAVENTURE

Hi Masha, I would be quite interested in this.

TestComplete license doesn't cost much comparing to other commercial tools, but it gives some benefits:



1. Support. You can't expect any qualified support from open source tools, only answers from community volunteers. And from my experience, SmartBear support is one of the best.



2. Supported components. In case of using commercial tools, if you need to test applications with third-party components (e.g. not native Web applications like Silverlight, Flash, Flex, etc.) you have to search for additional plugins (which are not necessarily developed by the same community). In case of TestComplete you get support for all these components from the box.



3. From my experience, open source tools have more bugs since they are not tested properly. Therefore, you have to submit to some of them and find workarounds by yourself.



However, in case of cloud-based testing I would choose Selenium. The reason is simple: TestComplete needs active connection to the computer where you run the tests (e.g. RDP). It means that if you experiense internet connection problem during the test run, it will fail. In case of Selenium this problem doesn't exist.

Hello, we now have support for Selenium WebDriver in the newest version of TestComplete. Early Access is available.



Thank you,

Masha Kozinets

Product Owner of TestComplete

The above has me curious?



How do you mean? Can we now control WebDriver using TestComplete?!?!? How are the Selenium bindings implemented?



I also use Selenium but mostly with the Python bindings. I presume this won't be an option within TestComplete?



Selenium WebDriver and TestComplete do very similar things - they are both used to drive and interrogate a browser in an automated fashion. I'm not seeing how you would integrate one into the other??? Or why?!?!?



Can we have more info please!