so here are the six top 10 automation frameworks you need to know one of my pet peeves is when teams stop creating frameworks from scratch they spend months and sometimes years developing very sophisticated frameworks and then the very proud of it but it turns out a lot of times that these frameworks not that maintainable or they were really developed by people that really weren't developers or they really didn't have the expertise in creating a real strong framework and the reason why bothers me is there's a lot of open source solutions out there already that you can utilize within your current projects to make your test automation efforts even better so if there's a solution that's already available why create the wheel from scratch is already things out there that probably can do what you're trying to do and honestly probably do it better because it was built by a bunch of developers that have contributed over time to create a framework that has proved to be stable for many users with many different applications so before you fall in to build your own automation framework make sure you check out these top six open source automation frameworks check it out so the first one is serenity formerly known as the city DS if you need a Java based framework that integrates with behavior driven development tools like cucumber and J behave and want to keep your test scenarios at a high level with low level implementation details in your reports then serenity might be the tool for you some remedy is an open source tool designed to make writing automation acceptance and regression tests easier a key benefit of using serenity is it acts as a wrapper on top of selenium webdriver and other BDD tools this makes writing BDD and selenium tests easier because it abstract away a lot of the boilerplate code you sometimes need to write to get started so if we look to the documentation for serenity you notice that there's a lot of built-in functionality like webdriver management managing state between steps screenshots running tests and parallel Jarrow integration and more all available to you without you having to write any custom code to get this functionality and serenity is really awesome at creating unbelievable reports adalah box Randi creates live and documentation like be used not only to view your selenium BDD test results but also as documentation for your applications if you want to use Python for your test automation efforts you can't go wrong using the robot framework the robot framework is a mature solution that was created for test and uses a keyword driven approach to make tests readable and easy to create it also has many test libraries and other tools you can use the selenium webdriver library is probably the most used external library but robot framer can test things other than just websites like FTP MongoDB Android app um and more the keyword approach used by robot framework is great for testers who are already familiar with other vendor B's keyword-driven testing making the transition to open sauce much easier for them so if your team is made up mostly testers robot framework would be a great option for your automation framework redwood HQ takes a little different approach from the other tools on this list it creates a website interface that allows multiple testers to work together and run the test from one web accessible location tests can be written either Java groovy Python or C shop code to test web applications with selenium api's or databases using their web IDE you can leverage redwood HQs exist in action keywords to get started creating and modifying tests quickly the built in IDE allows you to create and modify test cases and actions as well as the ability to execute your tests you can also run your tests against predefined machines in parallel and see a running history of all your previous test runs redwood HQ is tester friendly has a lot of built-in features that allows you to create complete test automation and test management solutions for your teams Sally has both been open source and pro version it was developed for testing web applications it works as a proxy server that allows you to use it within a browser from the site dashboard you can launch the browser you want to test it also comes with the controller that guides you to the recording and capturing of the interactions you want to perform against your applications so if you use the selenium IDE it's something similar to that when you hover over an element in the sahi browser for instance it will show you all the actions you can perform against that particular element you can also use the controller to play your scripts back Sally's record and playback functionality makes it easy to get started with test automation I've heard quite a bit about sahi but you know I haven't used it personally I just know that a lot of people rave about the pro version now the gaming framework is a little different from the other test frameworks that we covered so far in that it allows you to really focus on testing your user experience or your user experience designs or layout testing it was created specifically for UX testing and has a special syntax and rules you can use to describe and verify your applications layout it allows you to specify your browser size then one test against your application to verify the layout specifications Galen tests also generate a detailed HTML report with screenshots and visual image comparisons with a really cool heap map feature and tests can be written in simple text files using Java or JavaScript gauges one of the newest open Sauce test automation tools that runs on both Mac Windows and Linux and was developed by the folks at test works the same company that created selenium people who use TDD and BDD really will appreciate gages focus on creating Living executable documentation so gauge automation tests are called specs and I'm written usually in a mock down language using Java Ruby OC shop within your existing developers IDE s like eclipse and visual studio gauges functionality can also be extended with its support for plugins gauge is pretty new and still in beta but I've heard a few people say that they really really enjoy it so if your team is in the cutting edge test development you might want to give gauge a try this is just a small sample of the type of open source test automation frameworks you have available to you before you write the first line of code of the test automation framework make sure there isn't a library or framework you can leverage already stop wasting your time reinventing the wheel and check out one of these automation frameworks first for investing any more time and effort and creating your own automation frameworks from scratch