Automated software testing tools are used to automate interactions with software so tests can be run without a human having to perform each action. This lets one person run multiple tests at once and eliminates most of the human error associated with manual testing. Although there are many types of software testing, functional testing is the most common and the one most teams start with. That’s why we’ll be focusing on functional testing in this article.

In software testing, regression tests are a series of tests run right before releasing a new feature or update to make sure the critical functionalities of your software are still working. Regression testing is done to make sure a new build didn’t introduce bugs into other, existing features of your software.

Smoke testing is the practice of running a small set of tests to ensure the basic functionalities of an application or website are working before moving on to other, more comprehensive types of software testing. For smoke testing to be the most effective, it needs to be completed very quickly so that developers can get fast feedback about the stability of the new build.

Testim is an automated software testing tool that was developed with the goal of making test writing and maintenance easier by incorporating artificial intelligence (AI). Many teams choose Testim for automated software testing for two reasons.

If you use a framework like Electron to develop a desktop version of your web application, you may have run into a common problem when testing your application: So while you can test most of the critical functions of your app in the web version, there are some critical test cases for the desktop version that you simply can’t automate (such as setting up desktop notifications or verifying the app can be downloaded and installed).

Automated software tests are much cheaper to execute, take less time to run, and are less susceptible to human error than manual testing. That’s why most software companies eventually build an automated test suite. There are many things to consider when first getting started with automated testing, but arguably the most important is choosing the right tool.

Web application testing is critical to ensuring that your software is ready for users and doesn’t contain any major bugs that could cause you to lose credibility or customers. There are many different types of web application testing and each one provides different benefits at different times in the software development process. So, it can be difficult to know which type of testing will give you the results you're looking for.

Many QA teams choose Cypress.io for creating automated software tests because it executes tests directly inside the browser (which solves some of the most frustrating timing issues that are common with Selenium). However, many teams end up looking for Cypress alternatives because it still has a few major downsides: In this post, we’ll discuss these downsides in more detail and show how our tool—Rainforest QA—solves these issues.

Functional testing is one of the final steps before a software application goes live, and it’s designed to ensure critical user paths are operating correctly. It’s a kind of black box testing that doesn’t evaluate the underlying code of the application, but instead tests whether a specific input leads to an expected output in the user interface (UI).

Selenium is the oldest and most well-recognized automated testing tool for web apps, so a lot of software teams try it out when they first experiment with automated testing. But most teams quickly run into three Selenium disadvantages: Because of these challenges, many software companies that use Selenium find testing to be a huge drain on time, effort, and resources. That’s why we designed Rainforest QA—to solve the limitations of Selenium and make QA easy to scale and maintain.