As a company focused on quality assurance and testing, Xceptance always needs test automation software, especially end-to-end automation software. Several years ago, we built a Firefox add-on that was designed to create and run browser automation. The tool was primarily used by people who didn’t necessarily have a strong background in software development. Today, the landscape is a bit different: Mozilla cut the cord on the APIs we were using, and standard programming languages have largely taken over test automation because they are more flexible and less proprietary. These changes convinced us it was time to implement an idea we had already hatched, namely our own open-source test automation project: Neodymium. It is written in and utilizes the Java platform, it is MIT licensed, and of course, you will find it on GitHub.
Basis
There are many libraries out there to aid web automation in Java, so developers are faced with the task of choosing ones they like and somehow making them work together. On top of that, there are tasks that require some custom code to work properly. We identified the overall tooling problem mostly as a hurdle in getting started and setting up a project. Finally, there are always things missing such as test data handling, concurrency, and common patterns, which you don’t want to have to develop yourself.