Comments on: Squish for Web testing tool

By: ftorres

ftorres — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 20:30:20 +0000

What’s the cost of an automation tool compared to the salary of an automated test developer?

The price is not the most relevant feature?

Does the automation tool fit the needs of your company or project?

Would be a more interesting question?

For instance, these topics:

- Programming languages, IDE, Browsers, Extensibility.
- For how long can you evaluate the product before buying it?
- How responsive is the support team?
- How easy is the setup?

Are more important to evaluate than the price?

The price argument is just a false one just to promote â€œFree Softwareâ€, I will say at all cost (:>).

By: John_S

John_S — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 04:49:54 +0000

Use webaii at http://www.artoftest.com.

By: Dan Prince

Dan Prince — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 01:31:48 +0000

Check out PesterCat. PesterCat is has an easy to use but powerful set of features for testing web apps. It is not browser specific and runs on Windows, Linux, and OSX. An optional FireFox plugin makes recording test scripts using the FIrefox web browser easy.

By: Reginald Stadlbauer

Reginald Stadlbauer — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 19:52:21 +0000

Squish comes with command line tools and example scripts to drive the test runs without and user interface. This can be done across machine boundaries and the reporting is very flexible too. So any integration into any environment is possible this way.

By: Perry

Perry — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 16:58:30 +0000

Is there a way to run tests automated and unattended or does a user need to drive the test UI to get the test(s) started? I’m inclined to believe I have a professional QA department and as yet have not had a need to spend any money on commercial testing tools.

By: Reginald Stadlbauer

Reginald Stadlbauer — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 12:18:48 +0000

Sinced there was a comment that Squish would be Windows only: This is of course not the case. Squish works on Windows, Linux, Unix and Mac OS X with several web browsers. Actually the screenshot posted here has been made on Linux/KDE.

By: Charles

Charles — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 12:12:56 +0000

In my opinion, Selenium looks like a huge advantage if you didn’t use any testing at all (which it is), however the simplistic approach which originally (the table-based format of tests, for instance) can turn into quite the disadvantage rather sooner than later since it kind of restricts the flexibility and expresiveness of the scripts a bit much. For us, it just didn’t cut it since we don’t want to wake up one morning realizing that we need more flexibility but we already have myriads of test scripts. Sounds like a lock-in to me.

Selenium is much cheaper than any other of the commercial tools, but the cost of the tool shouldn’t be your concern really, it’s the developer time which costs big $$$ – and you don’t want them to create tests which you might have to ditch one day because you’re switching to something more powerful.

By: Reginald Stadlbauer

Reginald Stadlbauer — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 09:32:59 +0000

There are several advantages of Squish over Selenium.

First, Squish really aims at companies with professional QA departments where license costs aren’t a hurdle but things such as commercial support, additional services, simple setup, integration into Test Director, etc. are more important which you get with Squish but not with Selenium. Compare the price of Squish with some other commercial Web test tools and you will find it very inexpansive :-)

Of course there are also technical advantages over Selenium such as simpler setup, a browser-independent, real, full-blown IDE to develop test cases (with test script debugger, Spy, verification point editor, tets management, etc.). Then you have the choice between several scripting languages (Python, JavaScript, Tcl, Perl) for test scripts and additional APIs for things like data-driven testing and more. Not to forget the buit-in dedicated support for several Ajax UI frameworks so Squish knows what a widget in a page is and doesn’t just generically work on DOM elements which is also extensible for your own Ajax toolkits. This is very important to allow creating robust tests with do not break every time the internal DOM representation of the widget changes. And there are quite a few more.

From the feedback we get from our customers we must do some things right :-) There certainly is a place for free tools as well, but that doesn’t mean commercial tools have no place.

By: neoline

neoline — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 03:22:12 +0000

very expensive

By: Perry

Perry — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 23:23:08 +0000

I use Selenium, mostly the remote control, and can’t see any reason to use a tool that costs way more than free and who’s UI only seems to be available on windows. I just wish the guys that develop HttpUnit would go ahead and finish full support for all of javascript that the browsers support.

By: Brad Harris

Brad Harris — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 18:41:29 +0000

I agree. We started using Selenium 6 months or so ago, and its a night and day change from HttpUnit. Unless Squish has some big advantages, I don’t see the benefit to switching over to it.

By: IainD

IainD — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 17:28:27 +0000

Well, Selenium is free and open source while Squish is 1,600 Euros! There had better be something pretty amazing about Squish to make me consider it over Selenium.