Ranorex Studio

What differentiates Ranorex Studio from other similar products?

Ranorex makes automation easy. You can record interactions with both desktop and web applications and the artifact repository and code are automatically generated. This makes it easy to understand the building blocks needed when you want to create test cases that go beyond simple record/playback. At multiple companies, my teams have created over ten thousand test cases with Ranorex.

What is your favorite aspect of this product?

I love that it can work remotely via continuous integration on tens to thousands of servers using a floating headless license model. This is so convenient when you need to run thousands of test cases for regression testing. This was a little tricky to get working at first but the Ranorex support team was able to help us out and get this working for us!

What do you dislike most about this product?

Some of the command line switches can be tricky when trying to generate a report. Once you get them down it isn't a big deal. Also sometimes dealing with different resolutions can be tricky or if a laptop has a legal text at boot your script won't autorun (after reboot). My team got around this by having a GPO deployed to remove the legal text and auto login to the laptop (and then kick off the Ranorex script on boot). Of course, this isn't ideal but this is more of a windows issue. The Ranorex community and support were immensely helpful with this problem!

What recommendations would you give to someone considering this product?

Download the demo, you won't regret it! If you want to automate a Windows Desktop application or test across multiple browsers definitely give this product a try. It integrates very well with Jenkins and you can store thousands of test cases in Github and build out entire regression test suites. Hook up your test executions to VMWare instances via Jenkins slaves or test laptops and you are off to the races! If you are building out hundreds or thousands of test cases you will need to create an internal coding standard so people name test cases following a standard format and don't create the same modules over and over again

What differentiates Ranorex Studio from other similar products?

Ranorex is one of the easiest automation applications to learn automation and has a very graphical interface. Coding in C# is possible, but optional. Ranorex has a top-notch Spy++ application that allows the user to see the element tree, even for hard to detect dropdowns and tooltips, and is the best Windows Desktop legacy software automation application. Delphi, PowerBuilder, and other legacy software can be automated with this product.

What is your favorite aspect of this product?

Ease of automation for users who are not accustomed to test automation and their Spy++ element interaction tool. Even though I'm not actively using Ranorex for automation any more, I still use their Spy++ tool for finding elements that are hard to locate.

What do you dislike most about this product?

Performance is pretty bad. The Ranorex Suite IDE is very resource intensive, and the test runner is pretty resource intensive as well. The code editor is very limited. If you are used to Visual Studio, you will be pretty frustrated with the limited code editor functionality. Lastly, the licensing gets very expensive very fast.

What recommendations would you give to someone considering this product?

I would consider this product under the following conditions: 1. If you need desktop automation and Appium doesn't work 2. If you and your team are interested in learning test automation and don't have programming skills/experience 3. The application under test is legacy software (delphi, powerbuilder, etc) If you are only doing web-based testing, I would recommend learning and implementing Selenium, which is free and widely supported with plenty of tutorials and educational documentation.