Th11 - Empowering Open-Source Testing Frameworks

Over the last years the user base of open-source tools like Selenium and JMeter has increased and the tools themselves have reached a level of maturity satisfactory for many applications. Nevertheless, their popularity among corporate customers is still rather low. We are looking into a case study where open-source testing tools have been successfully applied by a large telecommunications company, supplemented by a commercial test management application, showing how this combination can fulfill the needs of both small teams and large development departments.

The decision for applying open-source automation tools was primarily dictated by cost considerations and the instantaneous availability of the technology for the development and QA teams. Unfortunately the commonly known drawbacks of the selected tools have soon appeared to be an issue - while they provide a sound technical framework for test capturing and replay, they lack the configuration management, abstraction and reporting capabilities which are ultimately necessary in any larger quality assurance endeavor.

The supplementation of the environment with a commercial tool which controls open-source functional and performance test executors, allows bridging the aforementioned gap. We weren't surprised to observe that the transitions costs to the combined solution have been near to zero as the actual automated test case definitions remained the same. More importantly, the customer's dependency on the commercial supplier is still very low as the automation definition stays within an open-source tool's format. This minimizes risk and fuels competition.

As experienced, this combination allows for an early adaptation of automated testing by small teams testing in an agile spirit without significant investments, while keeping the way open to wrap additional layers of functionality.
Key points:

• Empowering open-source testing tools by supplementing management capabilities
• Transitioning of test automation from small to large development teams
• Increasing testing tool acceptance