Test Studio | Visual Studio 2010 | Visual Studio 2012 | |
Point-and-click UI | ● | Limited | Limited |
Easy to maintain tests | ● | ||
Silverlight automation | ● | Only for Silverlight 4 | ● |
Test step keyword view | ● | Limited | |
Premier support
(response within 24h) | ● | ||
Native support for Telerik UI
components & Kendo UI widgets | ● | ||
Web-specific testing features | ● | ● | ● |
Data-driven testing | Automated | Manual | Manual |
Licensing model | Standalone app & a plugin that integrates with VS Professional | Visual Studio Premium/Ultimate | Visual Studio Premium/Ultimate |
Product updates | 2 major, 4 minor/ year | Unknown | Unknown |
Browser execution support | IE, FF, Safari, Chrome | IE, FF | IE, FF, Chrome (requires Selenium) |
Level of complexity | Technical and non-technical | Development skills required | Development skills required |
The Visual Studio approach to test automation is to offer a broad solution that is a good entry point for developers looking to begin test automation. As your automation needs grow, you may run into challenges that arise from Coded UI’s single approach for covering multiple technologies.
With Test Studio we address the specific automation needs of web and desktop applications. We studied the workflow of testers when automating web and installable apps, and their respective testing life-cycles which helped us identify areas that take the longest to automate or are very tedious.
In Visual Studio, to properly perform test automation of real line-of-business applications you always have to revert to the CodedUI test which is a pure C# or VB.NET class that leverages the CodedUI framework for automation.
Test Studio has been designed to allow most QA/Test professionals to automate without having to revert to code in most scenarios. Even complex conditional logic, element extraction, and data driven tests can be created and maintained without writing a single line of code.
UIAutomation depends on application level hooks that give access to external programs to invoke or retrieve information from the application. UIAutomation is 100% dependent on the developer of the application giving access to these parts of the application; else those parts can’t be automated.
Test Studio’s architecture relies on having full access to the application whether it is a XAML, MVC application or an HTML page. You can access any and every element in the application and perform real-user actions against it.
Visual Studio 2010 added support for Firefox thus allowing users to execute tests against two major browsers – Internet Explorer and Firefox. Visual Studio 2012 was finally able to include Google Chrome by leveraging the Selenium framework and its support for these browsers.
Not only does Test Studio offer test execution support for IE, FF, Safari and Chrome out of the box, it’s the first tool to add cross-browser test recording capabilities with its R1 2013 product update.
Microsoft were only able to add support of Silverlight 5 applications with their Visual Studio 2012 offering.
Test Studio has been automating against Silverlight since version 2 (2009) and has made many refinements in our record/playback compatibility with rich specialized features for Silverlight and WPF applications automation.