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I am trying to finalize a tool for testing an AngularJS based web portal.
I have explored Protractor and was quite sure of using it for AngularJS tests until someone from the team came up with a suggestion of using Robot Framework.
So, Now I need to compare Protractor with Robot Framework.
Protractor has an advantage of having customizations available for AngularJS. However, I would agree that the learning curve is not too smooth because of the terminology and concepts (Promises and Control Flow) used.
Now I need to understand how good is Robot Framework for AngularJS testing. Is there anything one would miss regarding Protractor if switched to Robot Framework? Please provide your valuable inputs for the same.
Learning curve
IDEs available
Ease of automating AngularJS UI tests
Any other relevant points you feel are important!
Being in the middle of exactly such debate right now, I can tell you a few things:
AngularJS has a "loading" issue. Protractor solves that issue by giving you the function WaitForAngularToFinish. You get other things as well from Protractor such as ByRepeatNG
Automating UI by Robot Framework is done using Selenium 2, and the robot library doesn't contain Angular Specific code (WaitForAngularToFinish)
For now we're trying the Robot Framework way
We've solved the issue in Robot by tapping into the Java Library ngWebDriver
We've created a new robot library based on ngWebDriver with autowiring (to get the Selenium2 driver from the robot library) that gives the same functionality as Protractor.
Pros to going the robot way:
Robot Framwork gives you the ability to do everything, Not just UI. So you can prepare the test environment exactly like you want it (much harder to do in Protractor)
English. The ability to let non-coders write tests (We're using Gherkin notation).
Stability (everything about NPM for example, is inherently unstable)
Cons to going the robot way:
Harder for the Javascript people to write underlying code for the tests (since some of the underlying code will be in Java)
Simplicity
Regarding you other questions:
Learning Curve - easy on both Robot and Protractor
IDEs available - I'm using a plugin for IntelliJ for Robot Framework. The enterprise version of IntelliJ (which costs a lot of money) works quite well with Protractor as an IDE.
Ease of automating AngularJS UI tests - Once you have Angular keywords in Robot, you're good. Before that, very hard.
Robot Framework is quite lightweight and learning curve is quite fast from what I could see in the different places I used it. In terms of IDEs, there are plugin for most of them (I would not recommend using RIDE if you already have a favorite IDE).
To answer question 3) and 4) I would say that it all depends on your organisation and culture. If the end-2-end tests are going to be written by the Web App Angular developer, then probably better sticking with Protractor as this is all in the JavaScript ecosystem. But if you have a separate team of QA who is in charge of testing, they might indeed find some of the protractor/javascript to be complex/heavyweight for what they have to do. With QA that are a bit less hard-core-coder than developers, I find that Python is more appropriate and easy. And in that case, Robot Framework is a very good choice.
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we are starting a new webapp using reactjs, the main reason why we chose react is because of react-native !, the app will be password protected, so we are not going to utilize and seo or server rendering features.
i find most boilerplates for react focus on universal setup yet in my case i want to structure app to sharing most amount of code possible between web and mobile apps
we started our webapp using https://github.com/mxstbr/react-boilerplate
is there a production ready boilerplate/starter that can be used in such use case ?
I think you're still a bit premature to try to share a lot of code between React and React Native. Ben Alpert, one of the React core team members at Facebook, said this in a recent AMA:
Over time, maybe we can share view code between native and web too. There are some cool projects in the community like react-native-web (https://github.com/necolas/react-native-web) which try to make this possible. We don't have anything to show at Facebook yet down this road but maybe in a year or two we could officially support using View, Image, and Text on the web for people who want to.
(emphasis mine)
For React Native, I would recommend taking a look at Ignite by Infinite Red (disclaimer: I'm one of the owners of Infinite Red). It gives you a great starting point and provides a lot of tools (including the fantastic Reactotron) to get you on your way.
Create React App is the best way to start building a new React single page application. It sets up your development environment so that you can use the latest JavaScript features, provides a nice developer experience, and optimizes your app for production.
Create React Native App is the easiest way to start building a new React Native application. It allows you to start a project without installing or configuring any tools to build native code - no Xcode or Android Studio installation required.
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I just starting to learn AngularJS (Version 1.5.0) with Material Design for Angular - damn looks so freaking sweet :)
For building and deployment i use Gulp to automate my tasks.
So far so good, but while googling my way to more questions i found Frameworks like MEAN Stack, Meteor, lumX, Ionic and many many more.
Im wondering if its better to start with one of the Frameworks or if Gulp + AngularJS + Material Design for Angular is just fine.
Before i played a bit with Foundation for Apps which looks sweet too but i really like the look and feel from Material Design. Before i used Zurb Foundation for my Responsive Webdesign Projects but consider to jump to Material Design (which is based on FlexBox) even i miss support for some older browsers.
So im bit confused if im wasting time to learn Angular Version 1 now and better straight jump to Angular2 beta. My concern is that i may run in a lack of documentation and help. Also i have to learn more about ES6 (which is necessary in the next time anyway but makes it more hard to start). I guess lot of the stuff i will learn from Angular v1 i can later on use in Angular v2 anyway, or?
Another question for me as a Freelance Web Developer is if its not better to stick with Angular v1 for a while and learn more about it and later jump to Angular v2 when its out of beta. Because the goal is later to get into some projects and i can imagine that the companies stick with v1 for a while till v2 gets more stable.
For some starting projects i wanted to create a few Templates and Apps for my Wordpress Sites based on Angular with Material Design on a LAMP Enviroment. My Webspace sadly doesn't provide NOSQL databases yet so i guess i will keep coding on PHP / MySQL for a bit.
So in short, if you guys where in my place (experienced in Web Development but new to Angular) where would you start right now?
What Frameworks, Extensions and Tools do you recommend for Application Development with Angular?
From a business point of view when do you think will Angular2 be widely be used on live projects and is it better to start learning Angular v1 or go to v2?
Thanks for your replies.
Cheers bin2hex
Instead of giving a biased opinion, I'll just provide for you a few links of project structures that are being used currently that might serve you some guidance.
https://github.com/TheLarkInn/angular-starter-es6-webpack (This one is Shamelessly authored by me).
https://github.com/AngularClass/angular2-webpack-starter
https://github.com/AngularClass/NG6-starter (I took some pieces from this repo to create mine).
I'd recommend looking into writing Angular in the 'Component Style' (like the above links). It is a new way to start out using Angular 1/2 for the future and at the least you can use these repositories as thought-provoking brain-food for your own standards.
There are also other bundling platforms such as Browserify and JPSM, however Webpack provides a lot of awesome out of the box functionality that makes Angular development really awesome.
I don't know much about AngularJS V2, but I made some AngularJS V1 projects last year. Here tools I use to make my AngularsJS V1 projects:
As project generator:
Yeoman
As depedency manager (included in Yeoman angular generators):
Bower
As task runner (included in Yeoman angular generators):
Grunt
Set of prebuilt UI components based on AngularJS directives:
Angular Material
Angular Strap
Angular UI
Actually in my opinion is better use AngularJS V1 for production purpose.
The most important thing is something you haven't considered. All that matters is that you get your html/css/javascript to the browser. Everything in-between is trivial and leg work.
Now that Angular belongs to google, they have started very rapid development to support developers of all sorts. Either way it's going to be very stable, and if you keep your code modulare and clean, it's easy to transfer. I would say just make something, make what you need, and keep working on it over time and as the framework evolves, and change your code to match. If you keep waiting for the next big thing nothing will get done, so it's better to choose a framework and stick to it.
I word my answer like this because your question is very subjective, and you should experiment and find an answer based on your needs. As a web developer, you have to learn many different languages anyway, so start with where you think is best, and grow as you figure out what you need.
I need to test an angular application and I'm thinking which testing framework to use.
Can someone please list the differences between those 2 testing framework, what is good / bad in each. when should each of them should be used? can the one replace the second?
Edit 1:
I'll try to focus my question. what I'm really interested in is the technical abilities of the 2 frameworks.
for example, some of the differences I have found:
selenium webdriver has the ability to run on grid in parallel on multiple machines, on the other side, angular scenarios runs much faster than selenium.
with selenium I can use keyboard keys such as Enter, Backspace and more and also do drag and drop actions.
selenium is not dependent on the app technology, angular is for angular apps only
Those are the type of differences I'm looking for - what can be done with one and can't be done with the other
thanks
Both should be used for testing an angular application. However, in my experience, they serve different purposes.
Angular e2e tests are your best friends when integrating new features into your application, or changing already existing features. They are there to make sure your application still behaves as expected if you are making changes to your code. These tests are much faster than selenium, do not need to be as in-depth, and, in my experience, are best executed before you push a new feature to your version control server.
Selenium tests should be used for regression testing. These tests should be far more in-depth than Angular e2e tests, and should be performed before pushing code into production.
UPDATE: This question may be less relevant now. As of January 2014, Angular plans to move from their own E2E suite to the protractor library for function tests, which use Selenium Webdriver.
If you're starting a new Angular project, you may want to look into using Protractor, as it is going to replace the current method of E2E Testing in the near future.
(Source: http://docs.angularjs.org/guide/dev_guide.e2e-testing)
I am struggling with this question as well.
Here is my thinking today:
1) Use Angular e2e testing for integration/regression testing the UI with mocks of your external dependencies (like the app server).
2) Use Selenium for integration/regression testing the complete system in a test/qa environment.
It seems Angular e2e testing helps fill in the gaps that unit testing leaves in testing view and controller logic that is tied to UI events. All of the Angular tests should mock external dependencies.
Selenium seems like the best fit for testing the entire system as the user will experience it.
This is such a subjective question, and therefore I'd first tell you to do some research. There is not much difference.
It is a very new project, whereas Selenium is a lot more mature. For instance, the JSON Wire Protocol that WebDriver is built on top of, is an actual W3C spec. This shows the project is very mature and very stable.
Due to the above, Selenium has a much much wider set of documentation, and a much wider community.
With Selenium you have a variety of different languages to use to code the tests in, as well as use the IDE. Angular limits use to pure JavaScript. For a lot of manual testers, this is a skill most do not have.
Both Selenium and Angular are open source, which (believe me) helps tremendously in debugging problems and understanding design decisions in their respective API's.
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Are there any tools out there which uses Image Recognition(searching, comparing, validating images) as base for automating and testing GUI software.I know ranorex supports it. Are there any better tools?Are there any gotchas in using Image Recognition to drive test automation?
Ok, first of all, I DO understand the previous answers: testing apps using image recognition isn't the best way to test GUIs. But, at the same time, I don't understand why you aren't answering the question in first place. He's asking for tools that work that way, I'd think he's smart enough to understand where he's going into.
Ok, now the main subject, my choice would includes:
Sikuli, a MIT project under the GNU-like MIT license. It uses Python over Jython. Free.
TestPlant eggPlant, a tool that works through a VNC server, so you can test apps in any VNC compatible platform (including smartphones). It has some nice features like OCR, test schedule and so on. It uses SenseTalk. Not free, you could request a trial.
Routine Bot, I've never used it but it seems pretty useful.
I would also discourage using Image Recognition with SendKeys and Click at Coordinates or (Button Images) to do UI testing. I have been recently using UI Automation to automate the testing of a WPF application with success. By placing small breadcrumbs (Automation.AutomationID="OkButton") throughout our application's XAML I have been able to write some C# Unit Tests that exercise different aspects of the application. Even without the breadcrumbs UI Automation is still capable of exercising an application, but it is slightly more difficult when trying to identify the controls on the UI.
A decent article on Code Project is available as a starting point.
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/WPF/UIAutomation.aspx
You will also need UI Spy, a free tool from Microsoft, which helps you find controls and manually exercise the controls through UI Automation as guidance for writing the scripts. The tool is buried in the Windows Vista SDK, after installation search for UISpy.exe. The UI Spy tool can still run on a Windows XP machine by just copying the EXE to the target machine.
Consider AutoItScript for driving Windows-based GUIs in test scenarios - AND scraping off the UIs. Consider tesseract open source optical character recognition. Also OpenCV for machine vision.
Free AutoItScript works at the API level in that you can read states of various Widgets and Windows sections, send actions to these UI components too, wait for state changes etc. It's possible to produce highly robust automation code that will ensure focusing on Windows and resolution independence.
Let me suggestion another solution.
It's not a complete UI automation framework, but rather a specific tool just for the Image validation.
It will allow you to ignore the unstable part of your images as well (random data, etc.)
It will integrate with any other UI testing framework you choose:Selenium, Sikuli, etc.
http://visualci.com
thanks for your comment! please Take a look at RoutineBot – interface testing software based clicking on certain image patterns and see for yourself how this idea is implemented in an
automation tool!
Old question, but perhaps this answer may prove useful to someone. I currently am using two products,
Testing Anywhere, by Automation Anywhere (http://www.automationanywhere.com/Testing/)
and Quick Test Professional, by HP (http://www8.hp.com/us/en/software-solutions/software.html?compURI=1172957#.UhJBwpLW5-k)
Both of them do the job well enough, and both support the use of image recognition. I am not entirely convinced that image recognition is in itself a bad thing. As with all things, you have to tailor your approach to your particular needs and use the right tool for the job.
Just thought I'd add another entry to this thread. Things may have changed, not sure, but when I last saw the demo, this product offered Sikuli-like IDE/interface/capabilities while being a commercial product and supported actual devices beyond simulator. Don't know if the tool has improved to detect objects by identifiers beyond images now or not.
SeeTest from http://experitest.com
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Looking for a tool to UI testing of a Windows (.NET WinForms) application. The idea is that the analysts will record the tests via some UI and it will be able to be played back over and over again.
Commercial tools are fine but bonus points for free ones.
Some others:
NUnitForms
Quail
I believe they're both free, and Quail looks really nice!
(I was going to just comment on an answer above, but ran out of room.)
We bought Ranorex, and I wouldn't do it again. Their licensing for 1.5 (what we're using) was unclear. Their written license was per user, their marketing said per machine. Still, enforcement was key-based, and not a big deal when a machine got wiped or a replacement tester came in.
For the 2.0 product, their licensing is now tied to the machine. Reimage a machine and you get to relicense it. I'm just not going to support that kind of hassle with my company's thousands of dollars, and we didn't upgrade.
For what they want for the product, a lot of the functionality could be easily written using the UI Automation Framework. Ranorex is a decent product, but I question its value for the money. We're moving a lot of our new tests to just coding to the UI Automation Framework, as we often end up modifying Ranorex-generated code anyway.
TestComplete.
You can definitely use capture-replay to capture and run the test script. But I would suggest that you must at least manually edit your scripts to make them
more readable
easier to maintain.
The good thing about TestComplete is that it is able to look into your form's properties, capture those properties so that you can refer to those properties by their name, not by just screen coordinates.
Like Tom E stated, do take caution while considering going down the record/playback path for test automation.
See Uncle Bob's article on Ruining your Test Automation Strategy.
The main problem is that the record/playback tools couple the tests to the GUI which makes them very fragile.
Uncle Bob's article does point out that some testing needs to occur on the GUI...but that he recommends stubbing out the business rule code.
Sorry I can't provide you with a specific UI test automation tool...but hopefully this caveat will help you make the best decision on how to employ the tool that you eventually use.
So far I have found:
Ranorex which looks really good.
Test Automation FX, also looks good and seems very well priced.
Microsoft's UI Automation Framework, which does not have the recorder but if I had to I could code one using this.
white which looks similar to the UI Automation Framework, but has an alpha quality recorder.
Comments please if you have used any of these.
At my company, we decided to go with http://www.sikuli.org/. We felt it was the perfect mix of cost (free), ease-of-use, functionality and extend-ability.
Sikuli is Python based (Jython, really) which is great and its open-source. There's a tiny bit of coding required, but it can be as easy as just calling functions. Their IDE makes it really easy to get started. It is not a record and playback tool. It functions based on computer vision algorithms - you give it screenshots of what to look for and it finds it on the screen and then performs the requested action (click, type, etc) on what it found. This is true independent testing since Sikuli knows nothing about the software its testing. It does not know about underlying APIs - it just does what a real human would do.
We have integrated Sikuli with Robot Framework, http://robotframework.org/, and have created lots of custom python code to build a robust testing platform. This may not be as easy as licensing a tool from a vendor but the time and talent investment in these two open source tools has been well worth it.
There are a bunch of similar questions on SO:
automate-interaction-with-a-gui-interface (Edit: no longer available)
automated-testing-of-windows-forms (Edit: no longer available)
automated-testing-of-gui
In my experience, there are a lot of good open source tools for the web, but not so much selection for open source thick client test automation tools. If you want good support with robust functionality, especially recording, you will need to look at the commercial tools (QTP, RFT, TestPartner, etc...)
You should have a look at http://opensourcetesting.org/functional.php A lot of tools are listed here and you should find something that meet your needs.
Visual Studio Team Test 2010 is coming with a tool for recording and playing back UI tests. You'll find some pointers at:
Introduction to Record and Playback Engine in VSTT 2010
Checkout Ranorex, commercial, quite expensive but powerful (not affiliated).
We were using Mercury TestDirector a few years ago and quite happy with it. (All the caveats as mentioned by others apply.)
Mercury was aquired by HP and the tools have been rebranded as HP QuickTest. Not sure how much has changed, but certainly worth a look.
I tried to include a link to the HP website, but the URL doesn't look too "stable". Not exactly a confidence builder ....
My proposal is QA Agent(http://qaagent.com/). It is free web based IDE for development of web automated tests. Basically you are using jQuery to develop your tests. You can run tests in your browser. It looks like a new projects, but I really like the idea to develop tests in the browser. You know how long it takes to set up your testing environment. With QA Agent it takes 10 seconds.