Automated software tests are much cheaper to execute, take less time to run, and are less susceptible to human error than manual testing. That’s why most software companies eventually build an automated test suite. There are many things to consider when first getting started with automated testing, but arguably the most important is choosing the right tool.

Web application testing is critical to ensuring that your software is ready for users and doesn’t contain any major bugs that could cause you to lose credibility or customers. There are many different types of web application testing and each one provides different benefits at different times in the software development process. So, it can be difficult to know which type of testing will give you the results you're looking for.

Many QA teams choose Cypress.io for creating automated software tests because it executes tests directly inside the browser (which solves some of the most frustrating timing issues that are common with Selenium). However, many teams end up looking for Cypress alternatives because it still has a few major downsides: In this post, we’ll discuss these downsides in more detail and show how our tool—Rainforest QA—solves these issues.

Functional testing is one of the final steps before a software application goes live, and it’s designed to ensure critical user paths are operating correctly. It’s a kind of black box testing that doesn’t evaluate the underlying code of the application, but instead tests whether a specific input leads to an expected output in the user interface (UI).

Selenium is the oldest and most well-recognized automated testing tool for web apps, so a lot of software teams try it out when they first experiment with automated testing. But most teams quickly run into three Selenium disadvantages: Because of these challenges, many software companies that use Selenium find testing to be a huge drain on time, effort, and resources. That’s why we designed Rainforest QA—to solve the limitations of Selenium and make QA easy to scale and maintain.

When a software company realizes its testing needs have outgrown its in-house quality assurance team’s ability to keep up, the first thought is often to hire an outsourced quality assurance provider—such as Applause—to run the company’s entire testing program.

In software testing, smoke tests are a small set of end-to-end tests that make sure the most essential functions of an application or website work properly. Many software teams run a smoke testing suite of 10 to 15 tests as a preliminary step before running an entire regression suite (which could have anywhere from 50 to 500+ tests) to make sure the app is stable enough to merit further testing.

User interface testing (sometimes called graphical user interface testing) involves testing software applications according to what the end user will see on their screen and how they’ll interact with it. For example, can you type in text boxes or click the checkboxes? Are fonts, headers, and other visual elements correct? UI testing can be done manually or with a test automation tool.

The goal of user interface (UI) testing is to verify that: However, most software testing tools either test the appearance of the application or the functionality—few tools do both well. To test functionality, most automated software testing tools primarily interact with the underlying code of an application, while assuming that the visual layer (what the user sees) is rendering properly.

Automating your software tests can speed up testing and provide more reliable test results. For most software teams, automation is necessary to achieve adequate test coverage. If you’re just getting started with automated software testing, you may be overwhelmed by all the options and have a hard time figuring out which tools are right for your team.