Soasta has added Selenium-based functional testing capabilities to its branded CloudTest platform to extend the open source testing tool with a test recording function, a visual test creation environment, distributed test execution, and an analytics option. Designed for testing browser-based web apps built with technologies including HTML5 and connectable to continuous integration servers such as Hudson and Jenkins, this functional testing solution is inherently visual in its environmental presentation and is able to record all browser events at the DOM (Document Object Model) level and offers multiple object locators.
According to Soasta's Tom Lounibos, the company is delivering "a first" with this extension; i.e., a platform that both software developers and non-programmers can use to build and execute complex functional tests. As well as HTML5 compliancy, Soasta's testing solution also supports technologies including Ajax, Flash/Flex, and Silverlight, as well as SOAP and REST web services.
"Teams that automate with Selenium run into framework and maintenance problems, and run into them in a hurry," said Matt Heusser of STPCollaborative. "SOASTA is the first of a new breed of Selenium-based solutions that have the potential to solve those problems out of the box because they have built the performance capabilities first; the entire system is designed to work together."
Key advances in SOASTA's functional testing solution built on Selenium include:
- Creation: Instead of coding in Java, Python, C++, C#, or other languages, users record tests directly in the browser and then edit them in a visual test creation environment.
- User behavior: CloudTest's recording agent captures all individual browser action events at the DOM level for more accurate test playback through any browser on any platform — Mac, Windows, or Linux.
- Visual programming: The visual editing environment supports iteration, nesting, looping, and conditionals for building complex tests. A rich set of test validations, location strategies, and other components can be extended with custom JavaScript.
- Agile development and testing: Functional tests, distributed test execution, and detailed test results can easily be incorporated into continuous test integration frameworks like Hudson and Jenkins.
