ACCELQ is an agile quality management platform that helps users achieve continuous delivery for web, mobile, manual testing, and APIs. It can be used to write and manage manual test cases for the functionality that may be too fluid for automation.
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SpecFlow
Score 9.8 out of 10
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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.
ACCELQ can support multiple technologies such as web, mobile, API, and mainframe. It’s also suited for SAAS solutions such as Salesforce and addresses challenges such as dynamic HTML. It’s easy to set up, and onboarding is easy, and overall lead time is comparatively less. The overall execution results are captured with screenshots, and it’s easy to debug errors. It has integrations with leading cloud-based desktop and mobile farm services such as Saucelabs, browser stack, etc.; ACCELQ is not developer friendly, and hence the overall adoption for a continuous integration scenario is very limited. If you are using a different test management solution, the integration between accelQ and that tool needs ti to be built and hence requires additional development effort, and it’s buggy too.
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.
When we implemented ACCELQ, we conducted POCs with many similar solutions. Among the tools we pursued at that time, accelQ stood out against Tricentis Tosca and QMetry automation studio. However, subject 7 did better. However, they were still in the nascent stages of building the tool, and hence we did not pick it.
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.
