Selenium User Statistics - UPward

Selenium vs. UFT

What is the most used tool today…most will say Selenium.

We still remember when most popular tool was HP WinRunner/QTP/UFT, but with the current trend of moving applications into the web interface, more and more are moving to cost-free opensource, multi-languages support - Selenium

Of course that it is hard to compare Selenium against UFT, since the first is focusing  on web testing only while the other is an overall desktop testing tool.

Here are some pros and cons per each tool/framework:

Selenium some pros and cons:

• Continuous integration is easier
• Big community and companies that can support
• Support few scripting languages.
• Open-source frameworks, providing developer with API.
• Selenium is a lower level tool with less functionality
•  Requires more time to develop and maintain scripts.
• API changes with every version and you need to set different machine per each version.
• A free tool
• Knowledge of Java doesn't come with full understanding of html dom. Do not confuse with JUnit, which they do use sometimes.
• Large Selenium projects look like any other project in Eclipse.
• Java is great for data structures and is a full OO language, unlike VBScript.
• Simple to integrate it to any tool, simply use other open-source frameworks.

QTP some pros and cons:

• Complete tool which wrap many low level code and functionality needs.
• Integrate with QC.
• No straightforward support for continuous-Integration development.
• Large infrastructure projects look cleaner with QTP.
• QTP has web tier descriptions separated from code by design.  
• All library files kept in QC and test data stored in excel file (by best practice).
• VBScript is great on Windows: along with QTP API you do get pretty strong access to Win API and direct access to HTML DOM.
• QTP supports old code since 5 years ago, and yes they have Customer support.
• Time to market is less than with Selenium.
• Profound deep GUI check and verifications
• Record & Play action
• Still you need to maintain the QTP scripts
• Source tracking and management is best with QC
• Commercial tool with cost of buying and maintenance
• HP support…sometime is good sometimes bad
• Include Object Repository, Spy and more.

Commercial Tools and Selenium

On 2014 many companies started to build GUI and Editors for Selenium

On 2015 more and more known commercial brands, like Smart Bear, were adding support and integrate selenium into their testing solutions, like Test Complete, HP LeanFT and more.

Selenium W3C standard approval plan, there is currently a W3C WebDriver standard in draft form; once this is approved and becomes an official, standard browser vendors will be responsible for creating their own browser-based implementation of Selenium WebDriver.

Once that occurs, then all the tool vendors will have to support Selenium because it’ll no longer be just their open source tool and it’s actually going to be a W3C standard that tool vendors will have to support.

As with most things in life, I don’t think there are black and white choices between one tool or another but rather a merging of the tools and using the right tool for the right job.

As we’ve seen in this report showing Selenium replacing QTP as the dominant test tool in the industry, don’t fall in love with any one technology, because it can change at any time.