Web Test and Unit Test Tools Homepages

Business Case Reasons for Load Testing

Commercial Load Test Tools

Product Review
Spirent Avalanche Spirent Communications' Avalanche product line simulates real-world user behavior, network conditions, and large web and application infrastructures. Avalanche eliminates the need for expensive testing infrastructures by emulating the behavior of up to two million users in a single, compact device. With Spirent's range of next generation testing solutions, you can test applications and network systems at and beyond expected peak volumes. This enables problems to be isolated and corrected before performance suffers or a network outage occurs.
Borland/Segue - Silk Test Superior reporting and interface. Excellent detail. Celar instructions and easy to use. Requires recording a scenario walk through.
Completly messed up loading IE with still 6 days left ot go on the trial. Does not speak well for reliability of the tool in Microsoft Windows environment. Maybe becuase I installed SQL Server.
IBM Rational Performance Works well, runs on eclipse.
Parasoft - Web King Smart Tool for going out and recording test scripts given only a top level URL. Allows easy customization of data and makes nice reports. Lacks a solid load test methodology.
Automated QA - Test Complete Today automated testing plays a vital role in many software development projects. Automated testing has long been thought critical for large software development organizations, but is often considered to be too expensive and difficult to implement for smaller companies.

AutomatedQA's TestComplete breaks this stereotype. It delivers automated functional, unit, regression, manual, data-driven, object-driven, distributed and HTTP load, stress and scalability testing in one easy-to-use and totally integrated package at an affordable price.

TestComplete is a full-featured environment for automated testing of Windows, .NET, Java, WPF (XAML) applications and web pages and servers. It has been designed to free developers and QA departments from the massive drain on time and energy required by manual testing.

NeoTest - NeoLoad Very easy to use. Relies on recording of a walkthrough and then playback. Simplified version of Silk Test with out the baselining capacity and with limited scenario design features. Possibly good enough for small test effort.
Mercury - LoadRunner/WinRunner Easy to use and clear. This product is the industry standard. Very similar to Silk Test. Writes scripts in C.
Does not seem to work as well as Silk Test. Reports errors and how to resolve them but the resolving part does not seem to work. Demo had several minor presentation glichtes.
Does not appear to have as sophisiticated a methodology or statistical detailed reporting as Silk Test.
Empirix - eLoad Similar to other products, particularly Mercury. Did not have sufficient time to explore before expiry of test period.
Open Demand Some problems with operation. Does not require scripting, but this has the disadvatage of requiring new walk throughs fo new scenarios. Does not appear to have the range of variation ability the SilkTest offers.Allows for the number of virtual users required for a given load test project. Reporting is limited and Java applet interface flaky and not easy to use.
Radview - WebLoad Somewhat clunky to use. Works by recording cscript from walk through. Seems like it is a command line tool given a GUI facelift with indifferent results.

Open Source Load Test Tools

Product Review
Open QA Home Page - Selenium Installs very easily as a Firefox Extension. Easy to load. Not so easy to figure out what to do. Appears to be useful for writing scripts for web site regression tests.
Apache JMeter It is easy to configure different threads using different data. Support for SSL is good. Pure Java application that can be run on multiple platform, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD in both GUI and command line environment. Ability to run distributed test, but it does not work well with Firewall. The result analysis function is not very strong.
Hewlett Packard HTTPPerf Excellent in dealing with underlying OS and networking issues, such as CPU and bandwidth sharing. Test can be designed as request-oriented and session requested. Accurate test results. SSL support, but there is a problem sending data with OpenSSL 0.98b under Freebsd environment.
Unfortunately, since HTTPerf has not been updated cince 1998 it is no longer of much use with current web echnologies such as SOAP and WSDL.

Open Source WEB UI Test Tools

Product Description
VistaTask VistaRunner provides advanced automation for Microsoft Windows. It can control every aspect of your computer, such as the mouse, keyboard, and web actions, without needing to write any programming code. VistaRunner is useful for performing many different types of jobs on your computer, and provides significant productivity gains in areas such as software quality assurance testing, IT administration jobs, repetitive data entry, or recurring internet tasks. It offers simple Windows automation, while still providing enterprise-level features such as data-driven models, low-level Win32 API access, and image masking.
Watin Inspired by Watir development of WatiN started in December 2005 to make a similar kind of Web Application Testing possible for the .Net languages. Since then WatiN has grown into an easy to use, feature rich and stable framework. WatiN is developed in C# and aims to bring you an easy way to automate tests with Internet Explorer.
Selenium Selenium is a test tool for web applications. Selenium tests run directly in a browser, just as real users do. And they run in Internet Explorer, Mozilla and Firefox on Windows, Linux, and Macintosh. No other test tool covers such a wide array of platforms.
  • Browser compatibility testing. Test your application to see if it works correctly on different browsers and operating systems. The same script can run on any Selenium platform.
  • System functional testing. Create regression tests to verify application functionality and user acceptance.
TestGen4Web There is a need for a tool which can record user actions on firefox. Save the recording to an xml file, also replay the saved recording. The output of the recorder can also be translated into automatic testing scripts such as httpunit, selenium, simple-test etc. TestGen4Web is of 2 parts,
  1. Recorder - Recorder is a firefox extension, built on firefox 1.1+, It uses firefox framework to run, display, save and load files.
  2. Translator :
    Translator framework is a collection of translators written in any language. The translator needs to take one or more input files, and output the automation tests, and the driver to run the test.
Push to Test TestMaker offers a New Agent Wizard to write test agent scripts for you. The Recorder is a type of New Agent Wizard that watches you use a Web browser and writes a test agent script automatically. You play-back the recorded test agent script to check the Web application for functionality. The recorded test agent script may optionally be used with XSTest to perform a scalability and performance test on the Web application. The recorded test agent script may also optionally be used as a Quality of Service monitor using the Service Monitor System (SMS.)
TestExplorer TestExplorer is a product suite for bringing the power of automation to manual software testing, and is specifically designed around the concept of exploratory testing.

TestExplorer is an intuitive and easy to use tool that provides both the right amount of structure, and a wealth of documentable results, from ad hoc testing, exploratory testing, and manual scripted testing.

It is designed to let the tester focus on the test, not the tool. With its VisualTest Playback capabilities, it allows testers to quickly review the proceedings from any manual test, to demonstrate questionable behavior for the development team, and to facilitate root cause analysis.

TestExplorer is the premier tool in the industry for manual test design, execution and results management. Don't settle for other tools that provide half a solution -- TestExplorer suite provides everything you need for a high quality manual testing program from end to end!

AutoIt AutoIt v3 is a freeware BASIC-like scripting language designed for automating the Windows GUI and general scripting. It uses a combination of simulated keystrokes, mouse movement and window/control manipulation in order to automate tasks in a way not possible or reliable with other languages (e.g. VBScript and SendKeys). AutoIt is also very small, self-contained and will run on 95, 98, ME, NT4, 2000, XP, 2003 out of the box with no annoying "runtimes" required! You can even make compiled executable scripts that can run without AutoIt being installed!
Microsoft ScriptIT Microsoft ScriptIt is a command-line utility for automating interactive software installations and system configuration tasks. ScriptIt works by monitoring the window titles of active processes. When it finds a window with which it should interact, it sends a set of keystrokes to that window. ScriptIt uses the window title or a combination of the window title and text that appears on controls within the window to identify the window that will receive the keystrokes. The use of the window title combined with text allows ScriptIt to differentiate between multiple windows that have the same title bar.
Win32::GuiTest Win32-GuiTest is a Perl package for testing and interacting with Win32 GUIs. The package features numerous functionality and is housed on SourceForge to allow for continual enhancements.
Twill twill is a simple language that allows users to browse the Web from a command-line interface. With twill, you can navigate through Web sites that use forms, cookies, and most standard Web features.

twill supports automated Web testing and has a simple Python interface.

Sahi Sahi is an automation and testing tool for web applications, with the facility to record and playback scripts. Developed in java and javascript, this tool uses simple javascript to execute events on the browser.
xenulink Xenu's Link Sleuth (TM) checks Web sites for broken links. Link verification is done on "normal" links, images, frames, plug-ins, backgrounds, local image maps, style sheets, scripts and java applets. It displays a continously updated list of URLs which you can sort by different criteria. A report can be produced at any time.
The Test Anything Protocol TAP, the Test Anything Protocol, is a simple text-based interface between testing modules and a test harness. TAP started life as part of the test harness for Perl but now has implementations in C/C++, Python, PHP, Perl and probably others by the time you read this.