10 Popular Software Testing Tools for 2021

Introduction

How many trusted testing tools does your QA team use in their projects? Our quality assurance team at Forte Group has already put together a curated list of 11 frameworks we utilize every single day, and these tools help us deliver in a fast and effective manner. Below, we will provide you with a comprehensive guide for testing tools that can be utilized for multiple tasks, whether that is load testing, exploratory testing, or test automation.

Moreover, at the end of this article, you will find the list of additional tools to maximize your testing game.

An extensive global survey conducted by Tricentis depicts the overall state of open source and provides several essential insights on the testing trends. The testing tendencies show that teams prefer to use functional testing, understandably, yet manual testing is here to stay, too.

Criteria for choosing one framework over the others were the following:

• relatively fast and easy setup (or out-of-box solutions)
• a supportive community or the developers themselves offer support for their framework
• clear and comprehensive documentation
• a number of integrations with other tools
• cool features like code reusability to test against multiple platforms and environments, etc.

Selenium (Functional)

Created in 2004, the Selenium test automation tool gradually became a testing staple for QA engineers for a good reason. With almost 20K stars on Github, Selenium is one of the most popular functional testing tools on the market.

Generally, Selenium consists of several tools united by one ecosystem: Selenium WebDriver, Selenium IDE, and Selenium Grid.

Selenium core features:

• Cross-browser and cross-platform testing
• Multiple testing languages (Python, Java, C# to name a few)
• Highly adjustable open-source code
• Parallel test execution

Selenium power feature:

• An open-source tool with precise documentation and a huge community of supporters

Latest updates:

• Selenium 4 (Intercepting Network Traffic, The Chrome Debugging Protocol, etc.)

Ranorex (Functional)

Ranorex is an end-to-end functional testing tool with automatic timeout handling, dynamic web elements identification, and a built-in page object mapping.

Ranorex core features:

• Cross-browser and cross-platform testing
• Regression, data-driven, keyword-driven testing options
• Extended and detailed reporting
• Automated tests both for real iOS and Android devices as well as emulators

Ranorex power feature:

• GUI object recognition, which is great for black-box testing

Latest updates:

• Intelligent self-healing for failed tests

PractiTest (Exploratory)

PractiTest is positioned as an all-in-one application lifecycle management solution, meaning that the tool provides both manual and test automation management options. However, the most interesting part is the exploratory testing feature.

PractiTest core features:

• Test case management
• Issue status management
• Customizable dashboards with detailed reporting
• Reusable tests
• Data structuring 
• Advanced direct-from-the-run bug reporting
• Integrations: Jira (Cloud, DataCenter, Server)

PractiTest power feature:

• Intuitive testing trends tracking for exploratory testing

Latest updates:

• Demo data projects
• Importing and exporting traceability

LoadNinja (Load)

Load Ninja is a performance and load testing framework, which is used for diagnosing the API and UI performance issues. LoadNinja has a built-in TrueLoad technology, which allows testing end-user experience by 60% faster than traditional performance testing by protocol.

LoadNinja core features:

• The usage of thousands of real browsers
• Test scripts recording as well as playback
• Real-time diagnostics of issues

LoadNinja power feature:

• Load tests automation with the use of REST API and custom CI/CD plugins

Latest updates:

• Downloadable CSV reports of manually stopped tests
• Comparison of recorded pages and pages seen during playback

Optimizely (UI/UX)

Optimizely is a robust UI/UX testing tool, which helps test hypotheses on redesigning or implementing new features in sites or applications. This tool is designed to validate any changes before rollouts, diminishing potential fail risks.

Optimizely core features:

• A/B tests build and run
• Sequential testing of new features
• FDR error control
• Easy integration into the code with the help of snippets

Optimizely power feature:

• The use of API to control the experiments, as well as monitor the statistics and experiments’ results at any time

Latest updates:

• Optimizely Agent to deploy the framework to the infrastructure provider of choice

SonarQube (Security)

SonarQube is a security testing tool that provides codebase vulnerabilities detection and assistance during code reviews.

SonarQube core features:

• A multi-language coverage (19 programming languages and counting)
• Suspicious code snippet detection
• Integration with GitHub, GitLab, Azure DevOps, Bitbucket

 SonarQube power feature:

• Detailed vulnerabilities descriptions for the code hotfixes

Latest updates:

• JavaScript SAST analysis & Azure DevOps Server onboarding
• Enhanced C++ support

Cucumber (Acceptance)

Cucumber is a Behavior-Driven Development testing tool for end-user experience enhancement. Cucumber is now an umbrella name for several clusters: Cucumber Open (executable specifications validation), CucumberStudio (collaboration platform for BDD), and Cucumber School (training and tutorials).

Cucumber core features:

• Integrates with the source control system
• A perfectly suitable framework for those who aren’t into coding
• An easy-syntax Gherkin language understandable for customers
• Vast and business-oriented documentation
• Compatible with a variety of languages, including Java and Python

Cucumber power feature:

• The use of Behavior Driven Development

Latest updates:

• CucumberStudio: a collaboration platform for BDD
  

SoapUI (Functional for API)

A headless functional testing tool with a data-driven approach and enhanced coverage. 

SoapUI core features:

• API security testing for safe testing of public or third-party APIs
• Scripted test creation
• API performance testing with the «Test Virtual Users» tool 
• Detailed and comprehensive reporting

SoapUI power feature:

• Mocking for virtualization and pre-release API testing

Latest updates:

• API Explorer - an instant debugger for API responses

TestNG (Unit)

TestNG is a Java-based unit testing tool, which was inspired by the popular tools NUnit and JUnit. Compared with the ancestors, TestNG has an amplified functionality, making it a multi-tool for integration and end-to-end testing. However, it is mostly suitable for unit testing.

TestNG core features:

• Multithreaded test execution
• Data-driven testing support
• Logging and runtime by the means of JDK
• Flexibly executed with the help of IDE plugin or by Apache Ant using build.xml

TestNG power feature: 

• Concurrent testing: big thread pools with various methods and policies available

Latest updates:

• Support of test retries via callbacks
• Possibility to disable mandatory listeners loaded via SPIs

MantisBT (Manual)

MantisBT is an open-source bug tracker designed for QA engineers and testers specifically. It provides local and hosted environment installation and supports all the platforms that run PHP (Windows, Linux, Mac). 

MantisBT core features:

• Built-in reporting option
• Various integrations from time-tracking tools to chats
• Suitable for desktop and mobile devices
• Compatible with plugins of your choice
• Multi-DBMS and multi-language library support

MantisBT power feature:

• Roadmap tool with trackable progress for release planning

Latest updates:

• Full PHP 8.0 compatibility

What Additional Tools Can QA Engineers Use To Ensure the Successful Outcome of Their Work?

Jenkins

A leading CI tool that can be successfully utilized for testing codebase changes in real-time. It is a great tool to incorporate into the testing process and automate some essential routines.

GitHub

GitHub is a version control repository used by millions of developers. Many QA tools can be linked to GitHub accounts so that reported defects are automatically recorded. For example, you might run manual tests on another testing tool while using GitHub for bug tracking.

Text Shortcode

Tmux is a popular virtual terminal multiplexer that lets you quickly change from several programs on the same terminal. You can separate them from one terminal and attach them to another one and use the command line interface without having to dump them out of one session to start another. It’s similar to GNU Screen but differs in that it’s licensed under Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD).

Conclusion

New frameworks are emerging every single month, the existing frameworks are improving and evolving. We hope that our list would make the task of picking the right testing tool more insight-driven. Feel free to suggest which tools turned out to be a great match for your projects!