JultikaUniversity of Oulu repository

Benefits of testing automation according to current literature are reusability, repeatability and effort saved in test execution, while some of the current difficulties lie in maintainability, initial investment and test case creation. This thesis presents a brief literature review on the state of testing automation and a larger literature review on the use of Selenium and Watir in web context. Literature review on the use of Selenium and Watir contains an introduction to the history and use of the tools, as well as a look on the academic literature and blogosphere on the subject. The aim of this research is to identify differences on performance of configurations used by open source testing tools Selenium and Watir in web context. This thesis presents a quantitative controlled experiment measuring and comparing execution times, memory use and lines of code used by different testing configurations used by Selenium and Watir. Tools used are Watir and C#, Java, Python and Ruby bindings for Selenium. These tools are paired with browsers Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Opera for a total of 20 benchmarked configurations. Results of this study show that by selecting efficient pieces to the configuration in the form of tools, language bindings and web browsers, increased performance can be achieved as shorter execution times, less used memory and more concise code. Even for the purposes of cross-browser testing, the selection of tool affects the performance of testing configuration.