A quick search for “Test Automation Tools” on Google returns 8,21,00,000 results. With new tools and technologies mushrooming every single day, it is quite obvious to get confused or feel overwhelmed when it comes to selecting the right tool or technology for your needs.
No, this blog is not about recommending any particular tool or technology. Neither does it provide any comparison of tools. There is never a one-size-fits-all condition. The choice of any particular tool depends a lot of business requirement, goals, and test automation objectives. Additionally, the success of test automation projects does not depend only on the tools or technologies. There are a lot of other factors too.
In this blog, we have enlisted some of the popular test automation tools and technologies. We have been using these automation tools since quite some time and have seen great results while automating softwares-

1. QTP [Now known as Unified Functional Testing (UFT)]-
   A product by Hewlett Packard (HP), QuickTest Professional aka QTP allows testers in automation of functional testing using Visual Basic Scripting (VBScript) as the language.
   • QTP is extremely easy to use with easy options for navigation, results validations, and report generation. Even the testers with no programming knowledge can use QTP.
   • HP offers a full-fledged support to QTP users through email, phone, and an active online community.
   • Getting started with QTP is really easy because of the many in-built features, functionalities, and configuration options.
   • It provides support for functional test automation and regression test automation through advanced solutions.

   QTP is popular amongst the testers because unlike some other tools which require you to code using Object Oriented Programming languages, QTP uses Visual Basic Scripting (VBScript) language which is easier to learn and code.

2. Selenium :-
   Selenium is probably the most popular test automation tool.
   • Choices, Choices, and Choices – Selenium offers unlimited choices to the testers. It allows the creation of test scripts using any IDE such as Netbeans, Eclipse or Visual Studio, it provides support to a variety of Operating Systems like Windows, Linux and Macintosh and it also offers the testers the flexibility to choose any programing language like Java, C#, Ruby, Python, Perl or PHP!
   • With support for a wide range of popular browsers, including IE, Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Opera, Selenium has gained popularity amongst the testing engineers.
   • Through a very large, vibrant, and active user community, Selenium offers detailed documentation and support.

   Available for free as Open Source, Selenium frees up the organizations from the worries of licensing costs and budgets.

3. Telerik Test Studio :-Touted as one of the easiest software testing tools, Telerik Test Studio offers ‘Navigate, point and click’ functionality making it easy to generate any kind of test cases including functional, performance and load tests.
   • It is an all-in-one testing software for functional, load, performance and mobile app testing.
   • For data-driven testing, it supports Excel, XML, CSV and Databases including MS SQL Server, Oracle or MySQL.

   With support for in-depth functional testing for web apps, desktop applications, mobile apps, HTML5, AJAX, Silverlight, and WPF apps, Telerik has gained popularity amongst the testing community.

4. TestComplete :-
   A functional automated testing platform by SmartBear Software, TestComplete allows QA engineers to create automated tests for softwares(Desktop applications, web apps, and also mobile applications). It supports keyword-driven operations for tests recording, scripting or for manually creating the automated playback and error logging.
   • It works very well with .Net and Java applications, websites, and also ActiveX in webpages.
   • It interfaces well with MSBuild, Team System, JIRA, HP Quality Center, and also run nUnit/jUnit scripts.
   • There are a lot of tutorials and general support available.
   • The error detection offered by TestComplete is quite precise and the reproduction of recorded scripts is very fast and quick.

   Apart from support for many languages such as VB. NET, C#, JavaScript, Delphi, C++, etc., TestComplete also supports various UI controls such as Flex, Flash, Sencha ExtJS, Silverlight, and jQuery.

5. Protractor :-
   With the rising popularity of AngularJS applications, the need for a tool for testing AngularJS-based applications has increased and Protractor, an open source end-to-end testing framework, is gaining popularity there. Built on top of Selenium WebDriver, it uses Node.js framework. It can be installed as a standalone test runner or can also be embedded in tests as a library.
   • It supports a variety of behavior-driven development test frameworks including Jasmine, Mocha, and Cucumber. These tools provide additional syntax and reporting tools which are useful for better test writing and management.
   • With automatic waiting, developers don’t need to worry about adding sleep and wait commands manually – it optimizes sleep and wait times and speeds up the testing.
   • It allows both unit and functional tests. It also runs the tests against application in a real browser.

   With AngularJS-specific locator strategies, Protractor provides out-of-the-box testing for AngularJS-specific elements, making it a great tool for testing AngularJS applications.

6. Krypton :-
   Termed as a ‘new age Automation Framework’ built on top of Selenium, Krypton by ThinkSys is being used by many Fortune 1000 companies for testing their web and mobile applications. It is an excellent automation solution for testing websites, web-based applications, mobile websites and mobile native apps and helps in improving time to market as well as ease of maintenance.
   • Automation test cases can be written as a set of commands. Krypton “Execution engine” automatically reads the test cases and executes these commands.
   • Testers can write their Test Cases in Excel Spread Sheets in an ‘easy to understand’ JavaScript which are reusable skills.
   • It has an in-built ability to perform backend validations.
   • It solves for many web browser and mobile device and browser idiosyncrasies.
   • By creating reusable objects, it allows for easy maintainability.

   Krypton helps the manual testers become experts in automation in 2-4 weeks without the need of knowing programming.

7. Appium :-
   A discussion about test automation will be incomplete without the mention of tools for automation of mobile app testing. Appium is one of the popular mobile test automation technologies. It is an open source test automation tool by Sauce Labs which helps in the automation of native and hybrid apps.
   • It supports execution on iPhone devices as well as iOS simulators.
   • Along with the support for multiple JAVA and .NET IDEs, it also supports open source IDEs.
   • Since it uses Selenium as the backend, testers can avail the Selenium functionality and use that knowledge base for testing mobile apps.
   • It is completely cross-platform and supports Android as well as iOS operating systems without having to write separate test scripts for each platform.
   • Thanks to its use of JSON Wire protocol, it supports a wide variety of programming languages.

   Appium allows testers to write the test codes using a variety of languages such as RoR (Ruby on Rails), C# or Java without the need of modifying the apps just for the automation. purposes.