OpenText LoadRunner Professional vs. Selenium

Micro Focus LoadRunner and its suite of tools, specifically VuGen works wonderfully for us for all web, http/https and web service calls. We've been able to build tests for near any scenario we need with relative ease. As long as we have crafted up requirements for our scenarios / scripts to managed scope, we've had high success working with scripting and data driving. Our main tests are web service calls - typically chained together to form a full scenario with transactions measuring the journey or a similar (measure along the way) journey through a browser. For web services we will use VuGen and browser we've shifted to Tru Client I have had little-to-no experience scripting against a thick client where a ui-driven test would be required. I know its possible but quite costly due to the need to run the actual desktop client to drive tests. We've been fortunate enough to leverage http calls to represent client traffic.

Incentivized

When you have to test the UI and how it behaves when certain actions are performed, you need something that can automate the browsers. This is where Selenium comes to the rescue. If you have to test APIs and not the frontend (UI), I would recommend going with other libraries that support HTTP Requests. Selenium is good only when you have no choice but to run the steps on a browser.

Incentivized

• It can simulate multiple users at the same time and help understand the performance.
• It can generate excellent reports and give insights into application performance.
• It is a fast tool and does not take time to perform its functions.

Incentivized

• For any web based UI automation, Selenium is the best tool out there to automate your tests.
• It supports multiple coding languages like Java, Python, Ruby, C# etc.. to choose from.
• There is a huge community of users and can get many answers on StackOverFlow.
• It has lot of other plugins to make your tests even more efficient.

Incentivized

• HP LoadRunner with new patches and releases sometimes makes no longer support older version of various protocols like Citrix, which makes the task time-consuming when using older versions of LoadRunner for some of the cases. So it should support older version as well while upgrading.
• Configuring HP LoadRunner over the firewall involves lots of configuration and may be troublesome. So, there should be a script (power shell script for Windows or shell script for Linux users) to make it easy to use and with less pain.
• I would like to see the RunTime Viewer of Vugen in HPLoadRunner based on the browser I selected in the run-time configuration to make it feel more realistic as a real user.
• Licensing cost is very high when we need to perform a test on application for a specific group of users.

Incentivized

• Selenium is pretty user-friendly but sometimes tests tend to flake out. I'd say roughly one out of twenty tests yields a false positive.
• Selenium software cannot read images. This is a minor negative because a free plug-in is available from alternate sources.
• Slowness may be a minor factor with Selenium, though this is an issue with basically any testing software since waiting on a site to execute JavaScript requires the browser to wait for a particular action.

Incentivized

We love this product mainly because of its high customization abilities and the ease of use. Moreover, its free and can be learned easily through online communities and videos. The tests are more consistent and reliable as compared to Manual tests. It has enabled us to test a large number of features all in one go, which would have impossible through manual tests. The reports generated at the end of the tests are really helpful for the QA and the development teams to get a fair view of the application.

Incentivized

For those who are unfamiliar with coding, there is a bit of a learning curve. There is plenty of helpful documentation and resources but it can take a little time to get the software up and running. Once you get the hang of how Selenium works, and what it can do, you realize how many things you can use it for, and how many processes you can automate.

Incentivized

Customer service is not that great. It's difficult to get hold of someone if an issue is supposed to be addressed on an urgent basis. No online chat service readily available.

Incentivized

The Selenium app has a pretty fat community of users. For the problems we are experiencing, we are primarily receiving support from these communities. In addition, there is widespread service support. Instant support is given to the problems we experience when we need Online support. We and our team are happy to provide this support, especially before important deployment processes

We did everything we needed to use it. Now we can execute our tests on different operational systems and browsers running few tests simultaneously. We also implemented Appium framework to execute our tests on mobile devices, such as iPhones, iPads, Android phones and tablets. We use SauceLabs for our test execution and Jenkins for continuous integration.

Incentivized

HP performance center stacks up very well for front end applications. Need more improvements for API performance testing.

Incentivized

At the time of adoption, there were not many other alternatives that were even close to being competitive when it comes to browser testing. As far as I know now to this day, there is still little competition to Selenium for what it does. Any other browser-based testing still utilises Selenium to interact with the browser.

Incentivized

• The scripts created with traditional web/http protocol are not robust thus re-scripting is required after most every code drop. Troubleshooting and fixing the issue takes more time therefore in most cases we do re-scripting to keep it simple and save time.
• In ideal world you would rather spend more time doing testing than scripting in that case mostly you could use an Ajax TruClient protocol. This type of script will only fail when an object in the application is removed or changed completely. This way of scripting will save you more time and helps you maintain the scripts with less re-work effort on a release basis. On the long run you will have a better ROI when you use Ajax TruClient protocol for scripting.

Incentivized

• There hasn’t been a downside to using it yet other than we’ve got to update the programs we create for each change.
• This has saved us hundreds of hours of manpower by allowing our automation engineer to rapid fire tests.
• We are able to screenshot and save entire sites before and after launch with a program the automation engineer created
• We can compare large volumes of data against data in excel docs with a program created using Selenium

Incentivized