9 Developer-Friendly Testing and QA Tools for Modern Applications

Nobody likes a buffering page or a loading site.

People expect to get the work done accurately and in a few clicks using a software product. Also, different businesses may have unique software requirements.

But how to ensure the software can reach typical demands along with special requirements?

This is why you should conduct software testing.

Testing in software development allows you to deliver an expected and bug-free product to the end users. This step in the software lifecycle upholds the product quality to not let down the customers.

In case of issues or errors in the product, testers identify them before they impact the actual environment.

A properly tested software product offers:

• Optimal performance
• Security
• Durability
• High-quality
• Flexibility
• Cost-effectiveness

And more…

Role of the Testing Tools in Development and QA

Testing a product after development used to be the case, but today testers follow continuous testing methodology, meaning testing happens over the entire software development lifecycle, leaving little fixes to the final and exclusive testing phase.

Now we are in a world of having tools for almost all major tasks, especially repetitive ones. Along the same line, we have many intelligent tools for testing in development and quality assurance.

Software testing tools assist you in all the phases of testing, from creating test cases to fixing bugs.

Moreover, they provide accurate results by performing consistent and precise tests, eliminating human errors.

Repetitive tasks and time-consuming cases in testing are automated with the tools these days. You no longer need hours of testing and waiting time. Results are now faster with the software testing tools.

Conducting tests via software testing tools allows testers and developers to seamlessly work together over the entire software development lifecycle, offering a seamless collaboration platform.

All these use cases resulted in a heavy market of software testing tools for quality assurance.

A few of the numerous available tools are designed for automating testing tasks, while some are possibly best at code analysis, and others may be for checking the performance of the product.

However, this list exposes the best software testing and QA tools, highlighting their purpose and special features that help you design modern applications.

Cypress

Cypress is an excellent open-source testing tool to create automated tests and execute them directly in the browser, testing the performance of modern web applications in a real environment.

You can simply integrate its light API into your favorite browser and start testing the developed web apps.

Just execute npm install cypress to get the tool into your environment.

Creating tests in Cypress is far simpler. It’s as easy as giving descriptive instructions in a close-to-human language, and the tool converts them to real tests and executes them.

Also, using Cypress Studio, you can automatically generate tests by recording interactions with your web application.

Top features:

• Build, test, and deploy directly in your web browser.
• Seamless installation and setup process.
• Creating tests is easier.
• You can go back to see how your application performed in the history.
• Automatically captures DOM screenshots and videos.

Playwright

Microsoft tops the list when it comes to creating the most successful software products. The same tech corporation built this evergreen open-source framework called Playwright for reliable web testing and automation.

You can test your apps on all the major browsers, including Chromium, WebKit, and Firefox. Also, its cross-platform support allows you to test them on Windows, Linux, and macOS.

Create test cases for multiple users, multiple browsers, and multiple functionalities and run them to ensure the product works in all scenarios and servers.

It has APIs to automate various tasks like navigating through web pages, capturing screenshots, filling forms, hovering elements, etc.,

Top features:

• Open-source framework.
• Aligned with all the modern browser architecture.
• Supports all major languages like Typescript, JavaScript, Python, .NET, and Java.
• APIs with rich automation capabilities.
• Native support for testing mobile web.

LambdaTest

The next-generation AI-powered cloud testing platform, which is trusted by over 2M+ users across 130 different countries, is none other than LambdaTest.

The tool is well-suited for testing both mobile apps and web browsers, as you can run real-time tests across 3000+ different browsers, mobile devices, and OS.

Run automation tests of selenium, HyperExecute, Cypress, PlayWright, and more on this secure and reliable testing platform.

Its parallel testing capabilities allowed the team at Edureka to run 200 tests simultaneously. This turned their hour-long wait into a mere 5 minutes.

Top features:

• Dedicated WordPress and Chrome extension plugins to conduct cross-browser testing.
• All the browsers on the LambdaTest cloud platform come with integrated developer tools for easy debugging.
• Leverages SmartWait algorithm to determine the optimal time for performing tests.
• LambdaTest Test Analytics shows you bottlenecks and intensive issues.
• Seamless integration with 120+ CI/CD, project management, and codeless automation tools like Jira, GitHub, Moday.com, etc.,

Selenium

Automate your web browsers for testing purposes with Selenium, a popular open-source testing framework. Its tools and libraries allow you to create cross-browser automated tests to test your web applications on multiple browsers.

This suite is a bundle of different components for different testing purposes. For instance, you should use Selenium WebDriver to create complex test scenarios in specific programming languages, while Selenium IDE is enough to automatically generate test scripts via its record and playback feature without the need for coding.

Also, you have Selenium Grid if you want to run several tests on multiple environments simultaneously.

With Selenium, run the tests directly in the browser and watch them live while executing.

Top features:

• Selenium has large community support due to its popularity.
• Multi-language and cross-browser compatibility.
• Offers separate components specialized in different testing goals.
• Typical web administration tasks can be automated.
• Extensive learning resources and documentation.
• Seamless integration options with other tools to extend its capabilities.

Cucumber

Finding a testing tool that is specially built for seamless collaboration can be a little tricky. But Cucumber is the world’s leading testing tool for BDD (Behaviour Driven Development), boosting your team’s collaboration.

Whether you are a techie or a technophobe, you can understand its tests as they are written as descriptive instructions in the English language following Gherkin syntax. This way, stakeholders, product managers, and business analysts can be involved in the testing process.

Stakeholders create the feature files containing desired features and behavior of the product in Gherkin syntax, then the developers/testers write code for each functionality in the feature file, and they are called step definitions.

Now the cucumber performs automation testing by executing step definitions and validating the product’s behavior.

Top features:

• Plugins in this tool are comparatively much faster.
• Seamless git integration ensures your BDD documentation is up to date.
• Large community with an official slack channel, SmartBear community, and development updates on GitHub.
• Get real-time insights into the system behavior with living documentation.

Appium

Appium is the right option if you are looking for a testing tool for native and hybrid mobile, web, and desktop apps.

Started as a tool for automated testing of iOS and Android mobile apps, the tool later expanded to test various mobile and desktop applications.

The tool leverages native automation APIs like XCUITest for iOS and UI Automator for Android to access various elements of the mobile apps.

Top features:

• You can use any testing framework with Appium.
• Specially designed for mobile test automation.
• Write tests in your favorite programming language using Selenium WebDriver.
• Utilizes standard automation APIs.
• Open-source and available on GitHub.

Katalon

Test and launch your software faster with this AI-augmented testing platform – Katalon. Apart from testing, the tool offers rich features like alerting of issues, planning efficient resource usage, analyzing the quality of releases, and many more.

Katalon’s TestOps prioritizes the tests and smart schedules them for optimized testing flow. Automate the deployment and maintenance steps with Katalon TestOps.

Also, shorten the delivery cycle by executing multiple tests parallelly with Katalon.

Katalon Studio provides various custom keyboards to reduce the time to create and execute automated tests. Moreover, Generate automated tests for all almost all complex applications with Katalon Studio.

Top features:

• Feature-rich testing platform.
• Leverage the tool’s out-of-box test reports for analysis.
• Easily detect the root causes of any rising issues.
• Ready-made test templates for common scenarios.
• Automatic load balancing capabilities to reduce test run times.

Gatling

In today’s world, people expect websites to be fast. So, you should ensure your services are available 24/7 and quickly by continuous load testing and performance testing.

Gatling can end your search if you are looking for a powerful load-testing solution to speed up your modern applications and APIs.

How does the tool test performance? You can check the behavior of your app or API by simulating high traffic in complex scenarios. With this, the tool can also detect performance issues and bottlenecks before they become an urge.

Top features:

• Automatically deploys load generators – fake virtual users interacting with your site to perform load testing.
• Spot the bottlenecks with the tool’s response time reports.
• Supports website, APIs, and microservices load testing.
• Offers collaborative and centralized interface.

JUnit

Many of the real-time apps, like LinkedIn, Twitter, Airbnb, etc., are built on top of Java. So, Java developers need to ensure that their code doesn’t break as things change and requirements evolve. JUnit is here to do this.

Junit is a programmer-friendly testing framework to test your apps built on Java and JVM. The tool offers simple annotations and assertions, making it easy to write tests, even for the ones new to testing.

Perform unit testing and regression testing at ease with this standard Java testing framework.

The current running version of the JUnit is Junit 5.

Top features:

• Open source framework.
• Provides simple annotations and assertions.
• Best for performing unit and regression tests.
• Specially designed for testing Java applications.
• Works well with Java build tools like Maven and Graddle.

Best Practices and Considerations for Using a QA Testing Tool Effectively

• Plan ahead what you want to test. That is, before employing a testing tool, it’s important to describe your system testing objectives, capabilities, scope, and support. This will help you select the right tool in the next stage.
• Understand the testing requirements and your tool’s capabilities. Pick the right tool to cater to your testing objectives effectively and explore it to make the most out of it.
• Write clear test cases that target critical areas and objectives of your application. These simple, maintainable, and scalable test suites let you cover wider scenarios in various test environments.
• Improve test coverage by testing all major scenarios like functional, regression, unit, and edge cases using an automated testing tool.
• Integrate the tool into your CD/CI pipelines for continuous testing. Also, integrate it with the other project management, communication, and development platforms you use.
• Clearly expressing your thoughts is necessary to decide on changes and improvements. So, utilize the tool’s seamless collaboration platform to communicate with your team, clients, and stakeholders.
• Analyze the patterns in test reports to spot the common causes of failures and fix them to release reliable software.
• Using a testing tool, run the entire system in a production-like environment in all critical conditions.

Conclusion

With several QA testing tools and frameworks available, it is easier than ever to evaluate your software before deployment. So, we tried to include the popular, efficient, easy, and cost-effective tools in this list.

Each tool in the list has its own strong points and expertise. Moreover, you get to see their abilities, features, and specializations to help you pick the right one that matches your testing objectives.

You may also explore the best functional testing tools to validate functionalities.