Can Ranorex adequately handle a large web app?

Question

I've been experimenting with Selenium to some success, however it's slow going.

Ranorex, as I've used briefly in the past can put a simple suite of tests together rather quickly. However, I'm concerned about scale-ability. The website I'm interested in automating testing for is fairly large in terms of how much test coverage it requires.

Watching video tutorials on modulating test steps gives me the impression that Ranorex isn't designed to really support a larger size web-app with detailed testing parameters. Organizing tests and test steps in general look very messy and clunky in the UI.

How big are the projects you use Ranorex for and how do you manage your tests and suites? How do you keep it organized?

Answer 1

I've been using Ranorex for web automation testing purposes for 3+ years now, and I can say it's the best UI automation tool I've used so far.

The application under test is a fairly huge site, where the end users can create individual accounts, but also enterprise ones that, depending on the account type, have a LOT of options that can be tweaked, configured and administered in a lot of different ways. Besides the main web app, there are interactions with two 3rd party billing platforms and CRM product.

Organizing tests seems pretty easy and straightforward to me, since you can create in your test suite countless folders and test cases. You can think at it like a file and folder structures where your folders are, well, folders in the test suite and the files, test cases. You can go as deep with the structure as you like. Besides that, you can also group test cases in something called test configs (e.g. a test config may contain one or more test cases). In my case, we have .txt files containing multiple test configs, and use Jenkins to feed one test config to a virtual machine that starts executing all the test cases belonging to it.

Now, for data driven testing, you can have something that they call Simple Data Table that is nothing else other than a table provided by the tool. Other options are using CSV files, Excel files (I'm using .xlsb, especially for large data files. Read more here and here about why is better to use .xlsb) and SQL tables, although I didn't used it myself.

Note: For performance improvements for the test suite GUI, you may want to disable the auto-loading of the data (in case you have a fair amount of data-driven test cases). It's the checkbox from the image here.

Answer 2

I have used Ranorex on a Very large web app in the past. Functionally there is nothing (that i found) that would mean it wasnt able to scale. As always, how you organise your tests will be your main impediment, not the app/framework itself.