Today, businesses are realizing the importance of leveraging test automation because they are compelled to deliver innovative offerings with faster time to market. Likewise, there is an urgency to improve the software quality with the rapid adoption of agile methodology in test automation that significantly mitigates project risk as it promotes continuous iteration.

Once considered a luxury in Software Development, test automation has now become a key element in the process. But with the software industry thriving towards shorter and frequent release cycles, proprietary test automation tools cannot be afforded due to their cost and limited platform coverage. This has led to the rise of Open Source Test Automation.

Open Source Test Automation has taken a massive leap by solving the two major concerns that cannot be dealt with otherwise.

  1. The ever growing competition in the Software Solutions business to stay on the cutting edge raises the requirement to be the first to deliver innovative solutions and features in the market. From QA point of view this translates to less time to test.
  2. The wide range of platforms and devices on which the solution has to be tested on, due to the diverse customer base of Software solutions today.

Over the past decade, open source usage has witnessed an explosive growth as more than 78% of companies run on Open Source Software with top QA open source tools including Selenium, Appium, JMeter, Cucumber etc.

Having provided top notch testing services for companies both big and small, Aspire has created numerous efficient, robust and reliable Test Automation solutions over the years. These solutions have enabled our customers to save time and resources during crucial releases, identify bugs in earlier stages of software development and guarantee on-time product delivery for our clients to stay on their business edge. This has been achieved by employing the core advantages of Open Source Automation solutions as below.

1. The Liberty to Customize

Unlike proprietary software packages, Open Source software offers easy customization options for organizations where it’s possible to add or tweak most functionality according to the test requirements. Such a high degree of flexibility and scalability ensures that the automated testing framework works flawlessly for the entire release sequences and facilitate increased innovation at low ownership cost.

2. Built Around a Strong Community

Perhaps the presence of a strong community can be the biggest advantage of the Open Source system. With the increased level of support from a huge user base of professionals with expertise across industries, members can exchange ideas, introduce new concepts, support queries, and work together towards quicker development and trouble shooting.

For instance, Cucumber offers community chat where users contribute to discussions about the software. The chat allows a user to receive an immediate answer from anyone online from users. Also, the collective power of a strong community eliminates the risk of secrecy and paves way for a transparent system and achieves complete visibility of the code base.

3 .Shorter Test Cycles

The growing agility in the software development demands shorter test cycles across an increasing number of devices, browsers and platform for faster time to market. Open Source software is easy to install and facilitates better collaboration for continuous integration because of its flexibility to integrate and leverage other tools to meet DevOps challenges.

4. No Vendor Lock-in

With Open Source, organizations can avoid vendor lock-ins which gives them the benefit of long-term viability and unwanted charges for product upgrades and support. This is because the use of open source technologies ends dependency from certain vendors and is free of huge capital expenditure. In fact, vendor lock-in was the paramount reason for businesses to choose open source tools and technologies based on the 2016 North Bridge & Black Duck Future of Open Source Study.

5. Bringing Innovation and Addressing Practical Challenges

Open source addresses several practical challenges in test automation along with the scope for innovation.

  • Support for emerging and maturing engineering models like BDD, ATDD, etc.,
  • Ability to exploit features of various special tools required for the enablement of test automation like Reporting, Dashboards, Test Management Integration, Dependency Management, Source Control
  • Parallel Execution
  • Levering Cloud Infra
  • Continuous Integration
  • Paving way to bring in standardization of levering development technologies – W3C standards, etc.,

AFTA & DCQaf – Aspire’s Test Automation Frameworks for Innovative Products

With the increased number of products in the market, testing has become more challenging and complex. The real concern lies in the security system and how well the testing process can be automated. Such complexity in product evolution has resulted in the huge momentum of innovative mechanisms and frameworks that can leverage open source technologies. Aspire’s independent testing services offers two prominent testing frameworks called

  1. AFTA – Aspire’s Framework for Test Automation 
  2. DCqaf – Digital Commerce Quality Automation Framework

These frameworks have been tested and proven to support and leverage the benefits of open source tools to ensure the accuracy and rigorousness of the testing process is maintained.

To conclude, open source software is a big win for businesses.

According to Eric Raymond, an acclaimed American software developer and advocate of Open-source software, the open source movement is advancing because of feature-rich, high quality, reliable software with compelling economic benefits like wide platform support (web browsers, mobile browsers and native apps) and parallel execution. Moreover, as mobile software solutions (Mobile sites and Native Apps) are being preferred these days and in future, Open Source Automation solutions are the obvious choice because commercial tools have very limited support for mobile devices.

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