Programming languages in demand for automation testing

Test Automation requires considerable amount of programming skills to automate test suits, where one has to automate and maintain huge amount of test cases and execute them automatically. The program to automate certain task can be as simple as shell script or a powershell script to a test framework developed using Selenium Web Driver and Java. There is a wide variety of test automation frameworks and tools available to carryout automation testing tasks. The choice of programming language can be determined on following factors.

1. Programming language and platform used for development process.
2. Automation Tools selection after evaluation of various opensource and proprietary Tools.
3. Competence for a particular programming language.
4. Platform used for DevOps operations.

Generally, it is a good practice to select the same programming language for automation of that used for development process, automation tools are evaluated and selected based following factors.

1.  Platform on which tool will be used Windows. iOS, Linux
2. Technology using which application under test is developed viz. HTML5, Android, UWP(Universal Windows Platform), Winforms etc.
3. Cost of automation tools selected, opensource, paid, free.
4. Programming Skills required for selected automation tool, highly skilled, moderately skilled or low programming skills

Popular Automation Tools and Their Supporting Programming languages:

Automation Tool	Programming Languages
Katalon Studio	Groovy and Java
Selenium	Java, Python, Ruby, C#, JavaScript, Perl and PHP
UFT	VB Script
Test Complete	VBScript, JScript, DelphiScript, C++Script, C#Script, JavaScript and Python

Following are some of the popular programming languages in demand for automation of which automation frameworks readily support:

Groovy

• Groovy is used as a programming language in one of popular automation testing tool Katalon Studio.

• Groovy is optionally typed, dynamic language, with static-typing and compilation.

• Provides constructs for data structures like lists, maps, regex, or ranges of values.

• Provides conversion of Json to Classes

• Power Assertion - Allows you to very easily understand what has made the assertion fail

• Spread Operator - The spread operator (.*) is used to execute an action on all items of a Collection 

Java

• Java is used as a programming language in one of popular automation testing tool Selenium Web Driver.

• Java is a programming language that is class-based, object-oriented

• Has best IDE support.

• Java is Typesafe, Portable and Platform Independent

• Provides Different Api and supports third party vendors

Python

• Python is used as a programming language in one of popular automation testing tool Selenium Web Driver and TestComplete.

• Extensive Support Libraries - library which includes areas like internet protocols, string operations, web services tools and operating system interfaces.

• Python provides constructs for list and dictionary data structures.

• Python capable of strong integration and text processing abilities.

• Python provides its own unit testing framework.

C#

• C# used as a programming language in one of popular automation testing tool Selenium Web Driver.

• C# is Object-Oriented, Structured Programming Language and Type-Safe programming language.

• C# provides collection for data structures like List, Dictionary, HashSet, Stack, Queue

• C# provides Rich Library

Ruby

• Ruby used as a programming language in one of popular automation testing tool Selenium Web Driver.

• Multi-paradigm: you can do Object-Oriented, Functional, Imperative programming

• Multi-platform

• Awesome testing infrastructure

• Not statically typed

• Not pure Functional or pure Object-Oriented

Javascript

• Javascript used as a programming language in one of popular automation testing tool Selenium Web Driver and TestComplete.

• Javascript is a multi-paradigm language, supports event driven, functional, and imperative programming.

• Javascript provides APIs for working with text, dates, regular expressions, standard data structures, and Document Object Model (DOM). 

VBScript

• VBScript is used as a scripting language in one of the popular  Automation testing tools UFT and Test Complete

• VBScript is also used mostly by Windows System administrators for automating the Windows Desktop