Decades of Leadership in the Software Testing Industry

AscentialTest has been forming in the minds of our founders for several years. After building QA Partner/SilkTest at Segue Software in the 90s, they got the opportunity to use their product extensively in the field. As consultants implementing test automation with various tools for more than 10 years, they’ve formed a thorough assessment of the state of the field. What they found surprised them: automated tests were too expensive to build.

Furthermore, the requirement for programming skills to move beyond the superficial tests that can be recorded left out too many members of the team. They also discovered that a large portion of test development time is spent ‘writing code’ to workaround object recognition deficiencies. Some users estimate that time to approach 80%. Clearly this explains why the decision to adopt automation is not always straightforward. With a fresh understanding of the challenges and our heads full of ideas, we’re energized and excited to bring about the next paradigm shift in test automation.

Brian has been working in the field of test automation for more than 30 years. Brian began as a QA Engineer using the testing tools available in the early 1980’s. He joined Segue Software in its infancy and served as the EVP of R&D during that company’s golden years. Brian formed Star Quality, a consulting firm specializing in test automation in the late 90s. After 12 years of experience in the trenches, he’s excited to be building the next generation testing tool that will increase the productivity and and effectiveness of test and development teams.

Dave is a pioneer in the field of automated testing. Dave developed ATF, one of the first automation tools, more than 20 yeas ago. He was a founder and Chief Architect of Segue Software, Inc., the original creators of QA Partner/SilkTest. Dave believes that no testing tool can be easy to use without a solid foundation. That’s why he is committed to providing AscentialTest’s universal agent with the most powerful object recognition engine in the industry.

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See How We Achieved an 83% Five Star Rating on Gartner

See how AscentialTest compares to the competition, using 18 key features and functions and across 14 different development platforms

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  • Integrated Test Planning
  • Object Recognition
  • Object Repository
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  • Drag Generations of Actions
  • Reusable Steps
  • Scripting
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AscentialTest recognizes application elements regardless of complexity without coding hacks or reliance on fragile OCR

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Creating tests with our drag & drop editors is faster and more efficient than recording or scripting

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Reuse promote faster building and maintenance of tests

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A Thousand G2 Reviews Later: Software Testing Tools Are Too Expensive


Table of Contents


Apparently, Commercial Software Testing Tools are Too Expensive

What a Thousand G2 “Dislikes” Taught Us

Over the last few weeks, we analyzed over a thousand reviews entered into the “Automated Software Testing” category on the G2 website. While we prefer relying on Gartner Reviews (they tend to be a little more comprehensive), there simply aren’t enough of them available to draw meaningful insights. Gartner only lists about 73 vendors, and only a dozen or so of the reviewed tools have more than 10 reviews. G2, on the other hand, covers about 231 vendors and contains about 13k reviews. So, while there may be a lot of debate about the value and veracity of the G2 reviews, it is great place to start.

We categorized the “dislikes” in the following buckets:

  • Buying it and getting started (cost, onboarding etc.)
  • Learning Curve
  • Poor UI
  • Lacking Features
  • Test Creation (complex object recognition etc.)
  • Test Execution
  • Test Management & Data Management
  • Test Reporting
  • Buggy Releases
  • Support/Learning Resources/Community
  • Slow or Unstable Execution
  • Resource Allocation Issues

Leading Dislike #1 – “Great software, but The license cost is just too high”

While many of the expressed dislikes were nuanced, idiosyncratic and somewhat difficult to categorize, several stood out as 1) frequent and 2) easy to categorize. They were – cost, support & learning resources, test creation issues and test object recognition/synchronization issues.

Here, we will address the cost issue, and hopefully provide the solo testing community with a full-featured testing tool at a reasonable cost.

Many of the dislikes related to pricing also mention the ready availability of Selenium, a free, open source solution for testing, albeit with severe limitations relative to commercial tools. And as best as we can tell, we have not seen another enterprise-level tool that attempts to provide anything remotely price competitive with free.

The Selenium Conundrum – When Free Isn’t Free

Why isn’t it free? Simple: the cost of labor swamps the cost of your testing software. Consider that in any test automation project, the fee for the tool is only a small part of the overall budget when compared with the cost of building the tests. So if you pay $10,000.00 for a testing tool and $100,000.00 in labor costs, have you saved money for your organization by selecting an open source tool, when it costs more than twice as much to build and maintain the tests?

Selenium Increases Labor Costs Relative to Good Testing Software

Nowhere will you read that Selenium is an awesome testing tool. You won’t read that it is easy to use or that the tests are easy to maintain. If there were a charge for Selenium, it is unlikely that it would be selected at all when compared to tools like AscentialTest that have been designed to promote productivity and provide a substantial return on investment in the first year of usage.

How Do We Know?

The AscentialTest team has been creating software testing solutions since the early days of the software testing industry (Segue, where we created Silk Test, was founded in 1988). Brian, our co-founder, was the head of R&D at Segue, and Dave, our co-Founder, was the Chief Architect at Segue. They also formed our own consulting firm (Star Quality) in 1998, specializing in automated software testing.  We have seen it all.

Don’t Believe Us? Ask Google:

Query – What are the downsides of using Selenium for automated software testing?

Answer:

  • Not an All-in-One Solution
  • Steeper Learning Curve
  • Limited Desktop and Mobile Support
  • Maintenance Challenges
  • Browser Dependency
  • Limited Image Testing
  • Lack of Built-in Reporting
  • No Technical Support

An Example: Browser Navigation

When a user navigates your target application, do they close and reopen the browser after each transaction? Probably not. But when you run a test with Selenium, each test opens its own private browser. That limitation leaves out a lot of usage cases. It also makes it very difficult to debug a test. If a test fails several minutes into the execution, there is no way to run just a part of that test, because Selenium needs to start a new browser with each test run. The productivity loss that results from just this one limitation is astounding. If AscentialTest worked that way, we’d be out of business.

The image on the left below depicts a typical test step in AscentialTest. The one on the right
displays a function that is part of a Selenium test. What do you want your resources spending time on: testing or writing more code? Do you really want to spend money on programming to create automated tests. You decide.

AscentialTest vs. Selenium: Feature, Function and Productivity Comparison:

While it’s true that Selenium is a free set of open source tools, using them is not really free after all. The costs and benefits of test automation are significant. We’ve worked hard to provide a testing solution that makes testers more productive, saving your organization time and money. If you still think Selenium is free after reading this document, we have some lake- front property in {name your location} that we would just love to sell to you.

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Software testing isn’t a puzzle to be solved, it is a job to be done. Now that you have seen the true cost of using open source tools, get started with Solo Tester, AscentialTest’s Selenium killer package.

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What We Are Up To Next

TFS/Azure Integration

Check our new Azure extension for executing AscentialTest command lines in the Azure Marketplace.

We look forward to offering additional integration with Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server and Azure through defect tracking and version control soon.

Omnis Studio

Automated testing support for OMNIS Studio is coming soon. All OMNIS elements will be supported including complex grids, list boxes, tables and tree views.

Custom Objects

Add automated testing support easily for your custom application elements by responding to simple test API messages with json strings. This feature will open up the possibility of testing any GUI element and  will be offered free of charge.

Test Debugger

Set breakpoints in your automated tests, view global and local variables and execute statements to make it easier to debug tests running on any of our supported platforms.

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