A cross-browser testing tool, playwright supports all modern rendering engines including Chromium, WebKit, and Firefox. Users can test on Windows, Linux, and macOS, locally or on CI, headless or headed. It is also cross-language, so that the Playwright API can be used in TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, .NET, Java. Test Mobile Web. Native mobile emulation of Google Chrome for Android and Mobile Safari. The same rendering engine works on the Desktop and in the Cloud. Playright…
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SpecFlow
Score 9.6 out of 10
N/A
SpecFlow is an open source BDD for .NET. that aims to bridge the communication gap between domain experts and developers by binding readable behavior specifications to the underlying implementation.
Playwright is works pretty well for automating the critical user paths of any web application, ensuring that core functionalities are constantly tested and catching issues before they reach QA, particularly through its seamless integration into our CI/CD (in our case, using GithHub); however, it is less appropriate for mobile testing since it doesn't support mobile applications. Testers still needs to learn another framework to do this.
It is best suited for implementing the automated test cases in a human readable form so it's easy for non-technical members of the team and stakeholders to understand the test cases, features and the functionalities of the application. Automation of Integration tests and End to End tests are good use case. It is less appropriate or situations where the focus is only on the writing and maintenance of unit tests.
Versatility to be used in combination with different kinds of automated testing like automated performance testing, API testing, UI testing etc. I use JavaScript, Selenium, C#, email testing libraries, database testing libraries in combination with BDD with SpecFlow. I am able to use all these with SpecFlow to make my automation framework to be able to automate any kind of automated testing.
It provides different widely used runner options like NUnit, XUnit etc. Before I started to work on establishing proper test automation in my workplace, the previous automation framework (non-BDD based) as well as unit tests used NUnit runner. The transition to using BDD was smooth because we could use the same runner and there were no compatibility issues.
The auto-complete feature is good. I use it with Visual Studio as well as Rider and I don't have to recall the entire Gherkin statements. I just type a few words and the entire Gherkin statement implemented in framework is auto-suggested by SpecFlow. It saves time and context switching.
SpecFlow does not accepts optional input variables in the methods defined during Gherkin statement implementation. Cucumber supports optional input variables in the methods defined during Gherkin statement implementation.
The tests identified while using SpecFlow with NUnit removes all white spaces in the scenario names. It makes the tests less readable. If the white spaces are not auto-removed, it would be much better for readability as well as their actual identification in the repository.
It makes automating complex user interactions easier, fits right into our CI/CD for continuous testing, and works great across different browsers. The Documentation is a plus, you don't really need to search a lot to understand and find what you need for the coding. The community is small but very helpful, which makes it a breeze to use and a must-have for keeping our software in top shape.
We selected Playwright over the rest for several reasons. The learning curve is faster, making it easier for our team to get up to speed quickly. The setup is pretty straithtforwared, minimal configurartion needed and a great example included in the configuration which includes all the basics to start writing using that spec as a placeholder. Compared to Cypress, Playwright support multiple browsers out of the box, giving us broader testing coverage. Appium is great for mobile testing, but extremely slow.
SpecFlow is .Net based which supports C#. Behave is Python based. Cucumber is Java based. Ghost Inspector is no-code based but provides very limited testing features. We wanted to implement BDD so we rued out using Ghost Inspector. Most of the developers in my team are C# experts so it was decided for everyone's comfort to go for SpecFlow rather than Behave or Cucumber. It's import to have technical experts in the language of the automation framework because there are many situations where the solutions to the test automation needs are not straightforward and implementing those requires expertise in the related programming language.
Everyone stays on the same page regarding the behavior of existing functionalities whether it be technical or non-technical individuals. So there is less need for multiple people to get involved which saves time and thus money.
Reusing the same code through the implemented Gherkin statement saves test automation time and thus reduces cost.
We combine SpecFlow with other opensource testing technologies to make our automation framework more versatile which further saves costs for us.
