What tool are you using to automate and which tool do you prefer?

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During TestBash Autumn @melissatondi showed us in her fantastic talk, how her company automates.
After her talk the questions were so many we didn’t get the chance to ask all of them live and one of those great questions came from @karenlewis :frowning:

Apologies I missed this in the presentation, but what tool are you using to automate, and in your overall experience, which tool do you prefer?

How about you? Can you share which tools you use to automate and/or which ones you prefer and why?

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Taking the broadest interpretation of tool here. I consider Python (as a scripting / programming language) as my go to tool for automating.
It is jokingly said that Python is the second best language for everything; and I’m using that to my full advantage. It can be used for almost anything. Here are some of my usages:

  • My preferred language in automation frameworks (hence I try to avoid frameworks that doesn’t support Python)
  • Aggregate and manipulate data from different systems (Jira, Atlassian, …) through their API
  • Control physical hardware
  • Create wrapper around Matlab scripts
  • Parse log files
  • …

And because it is all in one language, all of the above can be easily tied together

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I love Jenkins + Bash. It’s so powerful. When nothing else works we can always make it work with that. In the past we thought most of our software was too old to be properly automated. But it’s just that most tool focus on web applications/other languages.
We also use more usual tools such as Postman, Java/Cucumber and Squish.

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Not particularly my tools, but an interesting one I’ve seen recently: using Excel + VBA + VLookUps on large sets of dictionaries with hundreds of rules, to be able to generate JSON request bodies for multiple API, to build the operational backend of the product and also test data to feed via APIs for the product.

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