Comparative Study of Open Source Automated Web Testing Tools: Selenium and Sahi

摘要

Objectives: Testing has become an integral part of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). Through open source automated testing tools, the cost of the entire testing process, as well as the time it takes to perform the testing process, has significantly reduced. The primary objective of this research paper is to analyse the web testing tools Selenium and Sahi as to compare their features and performance so that a particular user can select a tool that is suitable in terms of usability and features required for a specific task. Methods: The selection of a tool should be according to the user's skill level. The usability of these tools should be taken into consideration. Using a tool which has a complicated and confusing user interface would be frustrating to the user even if it has all the features and the required performance. The tools are compared with respect to - the browsers and the operating systems that they support, the programming languages that can be used to generate the test scripts, the ease in setting up and configuring the tools, the reporting facilities that are available, their data-driven capabilities, the ability to perform parallel batch as well as distributed playback and their ability to handle AJAX. The IDE versions of the tools are used to perform the comparison on two different types of websites. Findings: The comparative study shows that Selenium is best suited for people with some experience and coding skill as it involves integrating various frameworks in order to implement high-level functionalities. Sahi is easy to set up and use but it does not have certain advanced features that are seen in Selenium. A major advantage of Sahi is its data-driven capabilities that it supports out of the box. No complex frameworks need to be set up for this purpose. Improvements: IDE of both the tools were used in the comparative study and not much manual scripting was done. Selenium requires another IDE such as Eclipse in order to write test scripts while Sahi allows one to write scripts in the IDE itself. Since this paper focuses mainly on the performance aspect of the tools, the IDE's were chosen to provide a fair method of comparison.