In early 2016, Signagelive—a digital signage company—had an informal approach to QA. When developers had time, they performed a few manual tests ahead of each software release and hoped for the best. This allowed the company to focus on growth and building new features, but the company reached a point where the number of bugs clients found was unacceptable.

While Selenium IDE has been popular in the automated testing world, most teams using Selenium run into these problems. There are lots of different test automation tools—from easier ways to generate Selenium code to no-code SaaS (software as a service) options—all trying to solve these problems. In this article, we’ll talk about key differences between the following tools that represent the three main approaches to solving Selenium shortcomings.

Even though automated testing helps you do more software testing in less time with fewer people, maintaining your test suite can be very time-consuming. Many QA teams have a hard time keeping up with maintenance as their product grows. If they fall behind, they get more and more false positives (i.e., cases where the test fails because of a problem with the test, not a problem with the application).

Rainforest QA started in 2012 as a crowdsourced testing platform -- QA specialists from our worldwide community would follow plain English instructions to run customers’ test cases. After two years of development, we’ve now added a proprietary, no-code automation service to the platform, including a visual test editor anyone can use to create, update, and run complex, automated test cases without knowing any code.

Manual regression testing is time-consuming, costly, and difficult to scale as your team grows. As you add more features to your product, you have to hire more people and spend more time completing your regression test suite in every software release cycle. Automating your regression test suite can help your team scale up testing without adding more headcount.

In software testing, the term test coverage refers to how much of an application’s functionality is covered by test cases. In practice, the term also often refers to the effectiveness of that testing. QA teams use test coverage as a benchmark because it tends to correlate closely with the quality of the end product. Better test coverage typically means fewer bugs get shipped to production.

Despite Selenium's popularity across the QA industry, it has drawbacks and won’t be the best fit for everyone. Specifically, Selenium IDE: In this post, we'll compare seven alternatives to Selenium, focusing primarily on our platform, Rainforest QA, and explore how the alternatives approach solving these drawbacks.

Almost all software and web-based companies (SaaS, e-commerce, and more) that care about a bug-free user experience will eventually need a systematic and repeatable process to test their products. And for most software teams, the only way to feasibly accomplish testing fast enough that it doesn’t become a bottleneck in the software development lifecycle is to incorporate automation tools.

Many software companies have no formal quality assurance strategy, and those that do take one of two inherently flawed approaches: Either they (a) ask developers to do QA or (b) delegate QA to a siloed team, whether it’s internal or outsourced. Having been in the QA space for a decade, we’ve learned that both approaches are deeply flawed.

In our last post, we looked at the multiple layers of testing and where UI tests fit into your overall architecture. In case you didn’t read it, here’s a TLDR: Testing architecture can be grouped into 3 “layers”: Layer 1 tests tiny chunks of code in complete isolation. Layer 2 tests larger pieces of code in partial isolation.