Top 11 Automation Testing Tools for 2021 (You Need to Know)

Here are the top 11 automation testing tools for 2020, one that you need to know for the new year, But first, if you have, 39, t already make sure to like share subscribe to my channel at the bell down below and get alerted every release A new video, So the first one is Selenium Now Selenium for the past four years to me seems like it:’s fallen behind in innovation, mostly because they’ve been working on a major task of getting Selenium WebDriver the standards in place and approved, But I think 2021 Selenium will be working on more innovative automation features in Selenium five, In fact, Simon Stewart, even kind of admitted to me in my latest int, review with him when he said So. For a long time, we were busy doing the specification and we sort of took our eye off the ball a little bit of how people were using it And then once this fact was done and we had some space, we were there.

Ok, how will people consume this? On there time once I’ve left the project.

I think that’s going to be some interesting stthesecominguser-of-facingive because we’ve done these nice user-facing things, but all API and the next thing that people want is things like? Oh, can you download the browser for me And can you download the crane driver for me or the driver or the driver or make sure the safari driver of my system is configured properly, But I think that if we’ve done some nice API, some for And I think the sort of additional functionality would be a really interesting way for whoever is leading Selenium five to take the project, But So look towards Selenium making more automation leaps in the future.

So you want to get on board if you haven’t already used Selenium The second one.

If you’re into JavaScript, next-generation
Webdriverio is often called the next-generator in the mobile test Funimation framework mostly because it acts almost like a wrapper on top of Selenium.

So if you’re looking for an automation framework that leverages Selenium and allows you to program in JavaScript or you want to run your test in different browsers using the Selenium grid, WebDriver is one of the most mentioned tools in my podcast Automation.

Experts recommend some reasons.

I think it’s a simpler syntax than you get using straight Selenium.

It works Shadow DOMS, which is a lot of these newer applications are shadow doms kind of hard to use, usually just using Selenium WebDriver Agile handles It also has useful debugging commands built into it, and it’s a good choice for both QA and developers. Speaking of a developer-centric system, if you have more of a developer-centric testing culture, your company Cypress is a tool that you should check out in 2021.

So, unlike Selenium, actually the original, Selenium, didn’t run in the browser, but SeleniumWebDriver doesn’t.

So Cypress runs the browser and sort of allows you to interact with your code, the network, the methods, and even the dumb updates in real-time, So any tool that’s not running in the browser can’t do this, But Cypress runs in the browser sort Of leverages all this extra functionality, because of that, So there’s a to both, But one of the advantages of running in the browser is you’re able to build-in all this other information? It also has retries, And this feature is essential because modern Web applications are continually updating themselves, but they’re too unpredictable, sometimes to automate at the time correctly.

For example, during test execution, my network might take a long time, So you can’t just an element to appear and say let’s say 100 millisecbuilt-inat, why do separate commands always have built-in retries and polling to ensure that, even If it takes a little longer than normal, the test will pass and won’t be flaky and it doesn’t need hardcoded delays, So that’s another advantage of using Cypress out of the box AnCypress, really concentrates on having a easy.

Install with Cypress NPM, You could simply install a single command and get all the screenshots and videos by default, and every Continuous Integration pl every platform.

And so the ease of use is of that makeup Cypress as well, I’ve spoken to a lot of developers on my podcast, and one of the key things they say.

Is cypress? It’s fun to use because it doesn’t interrupt their flow in the development.

Unlike Selenium in their experience.

Selenium, they say, is hard to pick up from them, but Cypress is almost like a developer-centric tooling into their world.

So developer-centric organizations definitely should check out Cypress. Now to me, Python is the best programming language due to its easy learning curve and flexibility.

I use like duct tape.

It’s awesome So for Python, folks that, like Python, not necessarily these JavaScript options, we talked about or you don’t want to have the overhead of programming everything yourself using Selenium the Python bindings.

There’s something called Selenium Base.

I think it’s, one of the quickest ways to get started with automation in general is to install Selenium because it’s a feature: rich Python-based Web application library.

It is both Selenium WebDriver API Pittas and includes cool features like reports, charts, and visual testing.

And if you look at the TIOBE index for December 2020, Python is the third on their list of growing languages and it’s gaining momentum.

So if you’re not on board with Python as well, Pythonmmend just learning the minimal amount of Python because it’ll help you with other things, When I was using straight-up Java at another company, I still used Python behind the scenes to do A lot of administrative tasks that I was doing, That was a menial task, But Python because it was so easy.

I was able to create these little scripts, including my line, so it was a big time.

Saver checked it up, So number five on my list and this list is in no particular order – Microsoft, Playwright, And just this year with many of the vendors and they’re excited by it. They started creating solutions around it, like Testim a free recorded tool that helps GUI functional test.

That could be run as coden source frames like Playwright, So cool features, And the reason why I think Playwright was needed is these.

Web applications tend to be extremely rich and responsive, And, additionally, developers are doing single-page applications that are doing a lot more in a browser tab than Web applications used to do a decade ago.

In this harehly responsive, behaviors of Web applications are primarily powered by handling asynchronous events, So that is very hard to automate using Existing tools Microsoft Playwright.

The team saw a need for a tool that could keep up and handle.

This new approach is a new open source, crossbars, automation, library, and testing the goal of Playwright is to provide a single API for developers and testers on Jmeter web applications across three major browser engines, acromion, Firefox, and WebDriver, And if they’re working on anything else they seem to be improving on this day by day And also it originally started as a JavaScript, Node library, But now it also supports multiple languages, like Python, Java and C Sharp, a cool tool that you can use to do a lot of automation.

A lot of things behind the scenes also so definitely check it out.

If you checked it out already, next is Karate.

I first learned about Karate in early 2017, when the t, oil was still in the early stages of development and had immediate potential it.

Since then, karate has matured into a staddsool with unique funnality that t always adding to it. It started mainly as an API testing tool, but I know they’ve ventured into UI testing as well, So you can do both.

You can do things like API testing.

Double’s, front Pen, Testing, API performance testing.

All of this is available in gherkin-like to test and try to use using a BDD gherkin-like syntax, But, unlike most BDD frameworks like cucumber bed backflow after you write that BDD, you need to implement it in a step definition.

So it takes some extra time to try to eliminate that by including everything you need within the BDD statement itself or the Girkins statement itself.

I’ll be honest.

Some people love this tool and some people hate it.

I don’t know why I don’t know why I get so many mixed reactions with this tool, But if you’re new to programming or animation testing karate is easy to use.

easy-to-use Java knowledge and it has an easy-to-use user interface.

So if this is something that sounds great to do, you definitely should check out karate in 2021. So another trend I’ve been seeing is more and more companies are more and more applications coming out, using almost like a wrapper on top of Selenium One of those that’s becoming more popular is TestProject.

Testproject uses the best of breeds in Selenium and Appium and behind the scenes in that framewofunctionalitiess added benefits of numerous other functionalities that you, don’t have to create from scratch.

The test project acts as a wrapper over other technologies as well, and it uses the power of what they have called addins.

So they have a library of all these other admins that other people have developed, that you can pull down using your project as well.

So saves you a lot of time in writing code from scratch.

So if someone had an interesting reste kind of framework that they created an ad in for Test Project, they can add it to the library you can download it and use it for your tests as well, So it is a cool community there, And so this means there.’s a lot of built In functionality available to you within the test project ecosystem.

There are a lot of things that you need to do normally having a code from scratch and creating a new animation framework, So they seem to always be working on adding features, And recently they came up with some new Ibbs features that I haven’t seen From any other or not many other free tools, So this is a free tool, But they have backed in AI functionality now that they’re, adding on as well That usually only get when you pay a vendor.

For So definitely something you should check out.

If you want to get a little more involved in AI or kind of this codeless-type automation, you could do both code and codeless-based automation as well.

So it’s a great tool to pick up download and get familiar with, for maybe, people on your team that are automation, experts, or maybe you are automation experts and you just want to focus on other things, not necessarily writing everything from scratch. This might be a twenty-one or a good option for you in twenty twenty-one.

So far, I’ve only covered functional automation tools, but if you’ve been following me for any amount of time, you know that I’m a big believer in automating anything in the CI CD pipeline that can help you deliver quality software faster.

So it doesn’t necessarily need to be a functional test.

It could be a Security test or performance tests could be infrastructure, building infrastructure with scripts.

Anything like that is what I consider automation, testing tools, and chaos Monkeys, One of these tools and memory is chaos monkeys.

So you may have heard of chaos engineering It’s been described as being like preventative medicine, in that it’s, a disciplined approach to identifying failures before they become outages, And so the best approach to achieving chaos is to proactively kind of inject to Test your system to see how it responds under stress – And you can then identify and fix, features or failures before they impact your customer or cause damage to your reputation.

Due to the poor publicity of an outage you could receive a because you didn’t test.

All these cases that could occur within your application And that’s, where a chaos monkey can help to chaos monkey as a tool you can use to randomly terminate instances and production to ensure that engineinstantsment their services to be resilient to in’s.

Failure to do a whole bunch of things to interject this chaos and instances, so you could test these weird cases before, Like I said your end users, get to know.

If you evert Chaos, Monkey or Chaos Engineering check it out. I think it’s a technique.

Your team could benefit from Jenkins on any of this type of testing.

Before So another trend you’ve, been probably seeing, as I have over the years, is the shift of trying to test things earlier.

Earlier in the software development lifecycle, And because of this, we’ve seen a lot of these automation tools.

We’ve talked about earlier, really plugging in earlier in our test, lifecycle, and or CI CD pipelines, But one of the lagging tools are areas that have been behind is performance, testing, and Security testing because, as we shift things earlier and earlier in the software development lifecycle – that means developers need to get more involved with all these other testing types of activity Is one of the activities that I feel that I see that a lot of teams feel that is performance and stress testing.

So a lot of these responsibilities are falling in on developers as well.

How can you lower the performance barrier to help get your developers involved in load and stress? Testing K6 is a developer-centric load and performance testing tool.

You can use it to describe performance-based user journeys or scenarios and have kiosks run them for you, And one of the main issues that you can deter a team from adopting performance testing practices.

Not many companies design their performance tools with developers in mind.

So they don’t necessarily use the same languages as the developers. K6 was designed to integrate seamlessly into a developer, CI CD pipelines, so they can use it from the command and line.

They can use their programming languages and the same ideas they’re using for coding.

Their front end or the functional test, you can also use for performance testing tests using k6.

So your training now performance tests like code as well, So the same practice is used for any other type of other type e of coding.

For your automation, test We have a unit test, will also now a performance testing using k6 and it’s a runtillly unique approach.

So, rather than waiting until the last minute to have some performance team care of performance, you could start to get developers involved in K6 is a gateway tool to help you achieve that.

Check out k6.

If you think you have developers who will benefit fwhoit or if you’re a test, automation engineer who wants to get involved in performance testing k6 is also a great option for you.

So also the next two tools as we go into 2021.

I keep thinking about monitoring the So test. Monitoring, I think, is going to be a big thing in twenty twenty-one.

So a few companies I’ve spoken with over the past year on my podcast one of them is Checkley, Twenty-one teams are picking up DevOps and twenty twenty-one.

Some more Agile teams are going to have to be responsible for the reliabChaos oEngineering Chaos Monkeyo, as you saw in chaos, engineering chaos monkey all that has to do with the resilience of an application, because now teams are more responsible, not just for testing, but also for making sure the application is responsive.

It’s resilient once it hits production, So it’s not once it’s a production, you forget about it: It’s in production.

You have to fix it And then, based on that, you put it into your whole feedback loop And then, when you’re developing suffer from the beginning.

You build what you learn from the production and you build it in from the beginning And it’s a continuous type of cycle.

So you see all that because monitoring is a critical piece.

I see a lot of teams missing.

A tool like Checkley can help you with that. So Checkley is an API and e2e monitoring platform from Martin Tech, Publications wrote iAtheliacript and other flexible and programable Athelia developers are hard on also because there’s a need for tools that fit into both developer’s workflow and for helping testers that Are working together with developers, You want to have a tool that everyone understands and the team can use and build out a true and on the emission test suite.

So it’s not just getting you To help.

You build a true test.

We and that now includes production as well, So Checkley is an API and a monitoring platform.

The solution from modern Web applications Check out Checkley for that And number 11.

We have DeepFactor, And just so you know Checkley and Deepfactor.

They have both paid options and they have a free option, And even if you, don’t have the paid option, you could still benefit from both these tools.

Deep Factor is a continuous preproduction monitoring platform that’s designed for development, rs and it provides Security, testing performance, and behavior visibility, seamlessly integrated into your CI CD pipelines.

So their engineering teams cannot just release their software at the speed of DevOps, But they could also release it fast with confidence and, as I’m saying in 2021 and beyond, Not only are we trying to develop or deliver quality faster and faster.

You want to be able to do it fast with confidence and using tools like DeepFactor Checkley. K6.

All these other tools are going to help you achieve that.

So let me know what you think.

Let me know if I missed anything And if you like, why not see at the bell tomorrow also if you want to go deep into automation and accelerate your efforts in 2021 and beyond, I highly recommend you check out Automation Guild.

It’s an online conference.

I started five years ago before all this covid 19 happened dedicated to testers to help them with all their automation efforts.

My goal and every Automation Guild is a learning to technique best practice.

A mindset that’s going to help you and your teams accelerate your automation.

Efforts in the New Year Generally want to check it out head on over to AutomationGuildcom and register today, As always test everything and keep the good the good.