The IT sector is aware of the emergence of QuickTest Professional (QTP) & Selenium as the popular choice of testers & programmers for their test automation effort.
First of all let us have a quick overview of both the software testing tools, before going into a broad comparison among the functionality of the two.
1) Quick Overview – HP QTP:
QTPis automated testing tool meant for performing functional and regression testing of various software applications and environments through a user interface like native GUI or web interface. It uses VBScript as the scripting language for specifying a test procedure, & for manipulating the objects & controls of the AUT. It supports a keyword and a powerful graphical user interface.
2) Quick Overview – Selenium:
Selenium is an open source software-testing tool that had been developed by Jason Huggins & his team This is released under the Apache 2.0 license and can be downloaded and used without any charge. It provides a record / playback function for authoring the tests meant for web applications. It offers a test domain specific language (DSL) to write tests in many popular languages like C#, Java, Groovy, Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby etc. Selenium works on Windows, Linux, and Macintosh platforms. Many additional projects have emerged out of the parent Selenium like Selenium Grid Selenium IDE & Selenium Remote Control having different abilities that provide a boost to the parent Selenium.
Now let us make a broad comparison among the two tools
| Sr. | What HP QTP has | What Selenium has |
| 1 | QTP is ideally suited for browser based testing | Selenium too can very well do browser based testing |
| 2 | QTP is licensed software & requires license costs that are quite a bit. | Selenium is an open source tool that doesn’t cost anything |
| 3 | QTP is quite easy to use. It is quite easy to edit the script, parameterize, navigate, playback & validate the results. | For using Selenium one needs to have programming skills. |
| 4 | QTP is quite easy to learn in a short time. | Selenium needs quite a bit of expertise compared to QTP. |
| 5 | QTP offers great benefit of the support for Business Process Testing. | Selenium users don’t enjoy such benefits |
| 6 | QTP comes powered with several add-ins by which user can comfortably work with Web, Windows, Java, dotNet applications simultaneously. | Selenium users don’t enjoy such facility. |
| 7 | QTP seamlessly integrates with QC and has excellent ability to automate non-web applications. | Selenium is an excellent tool for purely web-based applications, especially when you don’t need QC. |
| 8 | QTP works very well with database applications better than Selenium. | With Selenium one needs to exert hard to do the same job. |
| 9 | It is difficult to deploy smoke tests for web applications using QTP especially with Windows7. | With Selenium these tasks can be easily accomplished. |
| 10 | QTP uses VBscript as the only scripting language | Selenium provides a test domain specific language (DSL) to write tests in many popular programming languages, in addition to scripting with VB script |
| 11 | QTP users find scripts written in VBscript more flexible & easy to manipulate & as such tool tends to be cost effective due to the availability of a full fledged support. | Selenium users feel that the tool tends to be expensive due to lack of support & necessity of rewriting its scripts quite often |
| 12 | Resource wise it is quite easy to find engineers having expertise on QTP | Selenium Automation Engineer are bit scarce. |
| 13 | With QTP we can easily generate most comprehensive reports due to the availability of an efficient online help | Selenium users don’t enjoy such luxury as enjoyed by QTP users |
| 14 | Using a QTP framework needs less skills & everyone from a beginner to an expert can contribute in test creation to maintenance | Skill level expected in a Selenium Automation Engineer are a bit higher compared to QTP Automation Engineer |
| 15 | QTP users don’t enjoy a freedom of scripting language & IDE like their counterparts using Selenium. | For web based applications, development with Selenium is a wonderful experience since developer gets two benefits like;1) Scripting language of own choice2) IDE of Own choice. |
| 16 | QTP is one of the best automation testing tool due to its unique features like Object Repositories, Object identification, Smart Identification etc in addition to its unmatched strength in database testing. | Selenium certainly lacks such features packed in QTP. |
Conclusion:
Our objective had not been to favor one at the cost of the second. It is a matter of convenience for the testers & programmers to select a tool that suits their requirements best.
Lastly both these tools have their own advantages & shortcomings, while it all depends upon the users who truly knows how to exploit them to their best advantage.
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