Serenity takes care of many things you would normally have to code from scratch if you were creating your own BDD framework. And Serenity's awesome reporting feature also includes REST information, which means you can easily see and validate all requests and response details in your test reports without having to explicitly add any extra logging code. It creates another wrapper around REST Assured that makes Serenity Selenium tests flow seamlessly. Serenity recently added integration with REST Assured, the popular open-source Java library for testing RESTful APIs. It also has an extra annotation method, called When used correctly, gives you an extra level of abstraction that makes your tests more reusable and maintainable. Out of the box, it creates living documentation that you can use not only to view your Selenium BDD test results, but also to document your application. Serenity creates highly detailed reports. Serenity also offers plenty of built-in functionality, such as handling WebDriver management, managing state between steps, taking screenshots, running tests in parallel, facilitating Jira integration, and more-all without having to write a single line of code. It makes writing BDD and Selenium tests easier because it abstracts away much of the boilerplate code you sometimes need to write to get started. Serenity acts as a wrapper on top of Selenium WebDriver and BDD tools. It also lets you keep your test scenarios at a high level while accommodating lower-level implementation details in your reports.
It's designed to make writing automated acceptance and regression tests easier. If you need a Java-based framework that integrates with behavior-driven development (BDD) tools such as Cucumber and JBehave, Serenity BDD (formerly Thucydides) might be the tool for you. So before you fall into the "build your own framework" trap, be sure to check out these nine open-source test automation frameworks. For that, you need tools that can test both the UI and non-UI components of your application. That's why it's important to have a test suite that tests several different layers of your application. And since integration/API tests bypass the UI, they tend to be quicker and much more reliable than GUI tests. I'm a big believer in testing functionality beyond the user interface (UI) whenever possible. Test beyond the GUIĪnother area most folks forget to include when looking for a test automation framework is the ability to test APIs.
Here are the top open-source testing frameworks, and how to evaluate them.
Once you understand how to choose the right test automation tool for each role in your organization, you may end up with a mix of commercial and open-source options. While using open-source tools is usually a better option than building your own framework from scratch, I'm not saying open-source test automation tools are all you need. That's because they could have easily made use of existing open-source tools and libraries that would have met their needs without writing any code-and, in most cases, with better results. Teams that take these benefits to the extreme by building their own elaborate automation frameworks from scratch drive me crazy. After all, even minor bugs can lead to big problems. A framework will help make your test automation code reusable, maintainable, and stable-and save your business from costly defects. You simply don't need to build one that's unique to your dev environment. That's because, in general, a framework is a set of best practices, assumptions, common tools, and libraries that you can use across teams. In most cases, you'd do better to consider one or more of the open-source options available. If you're thinking about building your own test automation framework, think again.