Why world is moving towards open source automation tools

Why world is moving towards open source automation tools

• Cost effective but matured solution: As the market growth has pushed up the overall expense for testing tools,

•  it is directing IT organizations towards less expensive open source testing tools which offer the same 

• functionality. With low licensing costs and fairly minimal hardware requirements, organizations get 

• the extra benefit of flexible pricing plans as per the use of specific cloud storage.

• Flexibility as per business strategy: As the open source tool can be altered as per particular requirement 

• it reduces dependencies, unlike traditional tools. For example in Jira, the tester may include specific java 

• code for some test scenarios. This promotes faster time around time of testing and resulting quick promote 

• of the deliverables.

• Open source community support and collaboration: It is easier to seek guidance and help from open

•  source community. It is a centralized collaboration across the globe with the specific strategy and attention

•  to contribute to the community.

• Fast and frequent testing: As the automated test cases are short, those run faster and frequently as 

• programmed by the testers. Hence, it is a very effective solution to find the bugs when you are testing 

• your software in an agile environment with changing requirements. You can continuously add new test cases 

• over the time to existing automation while development is on the go.

• The paradigm shift: The software industry is facing the continuous threat of recession which ultimately 

• has tightened the organizational budget. As open source tools are easy to learn and even a programmer 

• can also work as a tester, organizations are stressing on their existing resources to learn it rather than 

• hiring traditional testers.

• Enable Agile testing: The traditional model of testing lifecycle follows “V” model. However, organizations 

• now have recognized promising success by using open source tools in the Agile development environment. 

• These tools significantly help in enabling early unit tests and also integration mechanisms which are very 

• effective for time-sensitive Agile projects.

• Freedom with greater security: Using open source automation tools frees organizations from vendor-specific 

• restrictions like their availability for support, usage rules and much more. With open source tools, 

• the user can make the decisions themselves and have the freedom to enhance the overall execution 

• speed of the testing process. Also, in terms of security, open-source software is definitely superior to 

• traditional frameworks.

• Leverage cross platform and cross language testing: One of the major criteria of your testing tool 

• must be its cross-platform and cross-browser support as  today’s applications are mostly run on mobile 

• devices. Open source tools like Selenium, Appeium supports these features covering any kind of mobile 

• app whether it is native, web-based or hybrid.

In today’s fast-moving demanding world, it is a challenge for any software company to sustain 
at the same performance level with constant quality and efficiency. The major challenges here 
are time and cost and of course market competitors. Hence to sustain your business, whether 
it is a product or service, quality delivery with optimized cost is the only solution. Otherwise,
 it leads you to customer dissatisfaction, and ultimately you will end up with bad market 
reputation. And when you are in the software business, testing is the key to assure the quality.

Over the past decade, the software industry has witnessed the revolutionary change in 
the software testing and QA domain with the boom of automation testing. As the automation 
testing has the ability to hit the core bottleneck areas of traditional manual testing, like poor
test strategy, delay in testing, enhanced cost due to wrong effort estimation etc, companies are 
leaning towards it. Moreover, with the upcoming open source automation tools like Selenium, 
Appium, JUnit and much more, the trend is following this path with a rapid pace. 
Even most of the renowned software companies are enforcing their employees to learn these tools.

A number of industry-standard open source automation testing tools is now available 
to fit with different stages of the testing process, from unit testing to complex user testing. 
Open source tools have become an integral part of the IT spectrum in nearly every area of 
software testing domain. Here is a bar chart for a rough overview of these tools in terms of 
trending popularity across the globe –

Mostly used open-source automation tool

Advantages those drive business to select Open Source Automation tools 

A real-time case study of an entertainment site by a market leading software company shows 
how open source testing accelerated testing:

Real-time example of automation

Conclusion

Although open source tools can drive significant quality and predictability in the testing life cycle,

proper approaches must be taken care before using it. Every app is different, hence proper feasibility 
study and pilot implementation are required before stepping into a live experiment. In some cases, 
open source and commercial testing tools are blended together to get the overall better outcome and testing reliability.