QA Automation Tools

Software Test Automation Tools

Testing today's complex applications is becoming more and more challenging. On one hand you have the latest languages and features being used, and on the other hand you have the time available for testing being reduced, as organizations want to release their products faster to the market. This is where software test automation tools are utilized. These tools help in automating the testing tasks to quite a degree.
The different software test automation tools can be grouped in 3 major categories:

• Functional Testing Automation Tools
• Performance Testing Automation Tools
• Specialized Testing Automation Tools

Functional Testing Automation Tools


These tools are used for automating the functional testing tasks of an application. They mostly cater to GUI related testing where the tool executes scripts that click the different objects and compare the results. There are a number of functional tools available such as:

• HP Quick Test Pro (QTP)
• Rational Functional Tester (RFT)
• Selenium
• Fitnesse

Performance Testing Automation Tools

These tools are used for doing the performance testing of the application. Checking how a system / application behaves under load, stress and in given software and hardware environment manually is all but impossible. These modern day performance testing tools can be used to load the system from one to hundreds of thousands of virtual users, observe and monitor each and every system parameter and aid in finding the performance bottlenecks. The leading performance testing tools are:

• Microsoft VSTS
• HP Loadrunner
• IBM Rational Performance Tester
• JMeter
• Open STA

Specialized Test Automation Tools

These tools can be considered as utilities and add-ons that do not fit in properly in the two major categories mentioned above. These tools typically address one or the other needs of automated testing, for e.g. tools available for assisting in security testing.