Eggplant Test Reviews

Our primary use case of Eggplant was for test automation for vulnerability scanning. We were making sure certain things were installed and in place; dates, scanning certain texts to make sure that what it was looking for matched in terms of dates and version numbers, things like that. This solution is software as a service. I'm a senior technical support analyst.

The difference was that rather than dealing with each machine individually, we could literally just click a start or script run and do what was required. The automation saved a lot of time and effort.

I love a good portion of this solution, the stand outs for me are the ability to read texts, and being able to automate anything you wish to do. If I wanted to go on YouTube and load up a specific video and have it take a certain image that appears on the screen, I can do it - it's pretty amazing, pretty cool.

The biggest issue I had was the crashing. You could be in the middle of setting up and writing up a nice little script and then it would crash. It was a common occurrence and frustrating but we handled it.

In the time that I used Eggplant, the software crashed quite a few times. Otherwise it was stable. There were some things we had to work around such as waiting for the computer to start up and adding personal credentials. Maybe there was a way for batch scripting to be integrated that might have helped. 

I'm pretty sure it's scalable but I've never thought of it in those terms. We had two or three hands-on users who worked with Eggplant on a daily basis; we were all working on testing. 

I never contacted technical support. We had our own in-house personnel that assisted us when needed. 

There were seven or eight people involved in the deployment. I don't recall the timeframe but it did take some time. 

If you're trying to automate something you do on a daily or monthly basis, I would recommend this solution. But if it's something that you want to do right now, one time and only one time, then it's not a suitable solution.

I rate the solution nine out of 10. 

The primary reason that we got Eggplant Digital Automation Intelligence is that we have a couple of systems that are run through virtual machines. Everybody who uses it in our company needs to go through a virtual machine. This solution was the only testing system that was able to run that virtual machine and test within it. It was the best that we found.

What we're mostly testing are web pages and Windows apps; Oracle transportation systems. They could have done local installs, but they put them in VMware and this was the best way to test them.

In a lot of the systems that I test, I don't have a real way to do full end-to-end testing. I don't have a way to set up data nicely, watch it flow through the system, give expected results and get to a final answer, and then clean everything up. It's very piecemeal. That's not necessarily why we got Eggplant. But what I have been able to do with it are a lot of smoke tests, which we didn't have, and several others. There are also some look-up screens where we set up look-up values for other areas, and we have been able to do full testing on those. We have actually found some errors in one application, errors that have gone into the backlog, and we hope to get those fixed so that we can keep building out more tests. It has enabled true end-to-end testing. So far, we've been able to get Eggplant to test anything that we've wanted to test.

Even with the mobile app, which consumes data from a different system, we'll be able to do some full testing within that, which is great.

Our use cases are somewhat unique, because we're not a software development shop. We are testing the pieces that we can and, for that purpose, Eggplant has helped. It has been great.

The model-based test automation has helped to reduce the test maintenance process. Now, I don't have to do a lot of the simple smoke tests and some other testing.

And while I wouldn't say that the solution has helped to uncover critical bugs that normal testing would have completely missed, it certainly has helped us find bugs and then verify that they've been fixed. In one particular instance, it found out that the continuous integration pipeline was broken, or that somebody forgot to push out all of the correct files, because pages weren't working. It pointed out that there was an issue with the deploy model.

I have really come to like Eggplant. Although I'm working in QA now, I worked as a dev for a very long time and I like the solution's scripting language, SenseTalk. It's pretty easy to use.

I also like the IDE and the helpers that it gives when you search something and double-click it. It gives you the outline that you can then fill out in your code, which is very similar to many others. I appreciate that they're doing that.

What I'm also really happy about—and perhaps this isn't technically about functional testing, but it's related to it—is that DAI's newest release allows us to test via scripts rather than models, because we have done 95 percent of our development in functional, not through modeling. I am really happy that then we can use the controller to run scripts rather than having to translate things to models. There are lots of options.

We have mobile apps that we are testing through it with Android Gateway, and that seems to be working great. And, of course, any web apps and Windows applications have been no problem. We are running several scrum lines, and we've just implemented with QA and, therefore, QA is important. What we're trying to do is get the ongoing suite of tests that look at things currently, and then it will be a built-on regression suite as we keep going and keep adding more and more tests. We want to improve quality before handing it off to our customers. If we have mainframe stuff, it's nothing that I've had to test or deal with. 

It's been very fast and very easy to use. Because there's that code behind it, we're able to write modularized code, so that when a new page is created, we don't have to rewrite everything, just the things that are specific to those pages.

The IDE could be even more full-featured. Because I was a developer, I was very spoiled by either Visual Studio Code or Visual Studio for shortcuts. For example, I was able to say "ctor" and hit Tab and it would create a template of a constructor for me. Or I was able to quickly type out a class mod with properties and methods using prop and hitting Tab. It would set up the template for me. It would be great, when I want to create a new function, if there were shortcut commands like those that help create all of the functions, or if there were shortcut features to do any of the complex plans. 

I would also like to see some of the syntax updated. They have the equivalent of a switch, but it's a very weird IF statement syntax. That could definitely be improved.

Another area that I would like them to improve is their database connectivity and ability within a database. Still, we've been able to use it with what they have and get it working.

I have been using Eggplant Digital Automation Intelligence for about 14 months.

I can't think of any problems. It's been stable for me.

In terms of scalability, since I'm writing functions, it's as fast as I can write them.

About eight months ago, we were going to have a fourth person work on it. They didn't want to get an extra license so we were having to work around the fact that we only had three licenses, but potentially four people working on it. However, given our setup, I could see that it would be easy to add another license if that's what we truly needed and get somebody up and running fairly quickly.

The roles of our users are two QA people and one intern. What they're doing is very similar to what I'm doing. The intern is working closely with me, doing a lot of the tests that I just haven't had time for. On our website we have four sub-domains. I would start the intern on the basics and then she would be able to completely write all of the smoke tests at least, and the basic code tests for that, no problem.

The other QA is the person who is using it through the VM because of the need for the Oracle system. He's also been using that for full integration testing, setting up data, verifying that it goes through, and that it gets the expected result at the end. He's also the one who is working on performance. He wants to start having the equivalent of hundreds of users hitting it to see how well our systems do.

In terms of maintenance of the solution, I handle all the DAI upgrades on the server as needed, but there isn't a lot of maintenance involved. I believe there are three updates a year. It's just a matter of letting everybody know how to redownload and install it. I've updated DAI once and it went very smoothly and worked well. I have a weekly meeting with one of their technical people and for the DAI update I said to them, "Hey, here's my plan," and made sure that it looked good to them, but I was the one who enacted it.

In terms of general runtime and being able to do whatever we need to do, anything that we have wanted to do for our tests, we've been able to get Eggplant to do it for us. We have mainly gotten some smoke and other automated tests going. We want to ramp up with more of those, but the area that we really need to expand into is reporting. Management is going to want some better reports than we've been giving them but we just haven't had time to look at that aspect, because we have wanted to keep going with the tests, first and foremost. We give them a little "okay," or we give them numbers, rather than providing actual reports. We do want to get to that eventually because I know the solution has that capability.

We have emailed their tech support and they have been absolutely fine. They have usually responded within a day. If needed, I can jump onto a Microsoft Teams call and work directly with their tech support to get problems solved.

Before Eggplant, what we had been doing was C# programming in Visual Studio using Selenium, Gherkin, and Cucumber against Chrome, which is our preferred browser. The reason we went with Eggplant was that we had to use a VM to get to a lot of the products that we use internally, to help test them. The ability to test in virtual machines was huge.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was just a matter of installing the solution locally. It took longer on our side because we had to get a dedicated server, but once we had that server, setting up the license manager on it was very straightforward. Putting in new licenses for it when they expired, until we got our permanent ones, was quite easy. I had no problems with any part of the setup or in running it.

For the third person on the team who's been using it, the biggest issue has been permissions. She's not a developer like the other two are, so she doesn't have local admin permissions. We've just had to go through help desk at times, but otherwise it's been very easy.

Our implementation strategy is that we want to get it up and running and to get scheduled tests and their results. That's what we're working towards. We're hoping to generate some sort of report, whether it's a CSV or something along those lines, to see the daily scheduled test-run results.

We're still in the process of setting up ROI metrics. The last number that I saw is that we probably have 200 scripts running. We're trying to get them on a daily schedule, and that is about three hours of testing that we don't have to do, and that's per day. Every day it does the regression testing and we know if we have any problems.

In terms of deployment of the solution, we have an internal server in a private cloud running the licensing machine and we have three dev licenses for the product as well as two run-time licenses.

The development license allows you to run Eggplant Digital Automation Intelligence and allows you to test it and run your script. The runtime license is what is used when you set up a schedule. All it needs is a run-time license to run the executables and run the tests. But since you don't need the full Eggplant Digital Automation Intelligence Functional IDE, you just need the run-time license.

The other QA in our organization was looking at a testing product called Ranorex. After they fully understood what it was he was trying to do, they're the ones who said that Eggplant is probably the best solution for that.

Jump in and try it. Don't be afraid of it. Before COVID, Eggplant would train a client for two weeks onsite and then everything would be handled through tech support. Not that the worldwide pandemic was good, but because of COVID we started getting a weekly meeting with one of their tech people, and that has been awesome. He's been a great resource. We go through scripts with him, we can send him something and he can respond back via email. But we also have face time where we can say, "Hey, I tried this, it didn't work," and we can sit there and work together through the issue and figure it out.

Utilize all the resources and play around with it. It's not a simple system, but it's worth learning the details of it because you're going to get so much more out of it.

If someone were to say to me, "We are not comfortable with automating 70 percent of our linear path," that would be fine with me, because I'm not trying to sell anything. But I would point out to them that, by having a robust regression suite that they can run and that they can rely on, they are going to free up their testers to be able to work on the edge cases or the strange business issues. They will be available for all of the manual testing that is either too complex or consists of one or two things that just change often enough that they're difficult to automate. It lets their people then focus on those things rather than just the basics of whether or not the code was released properly or files were forgotten.

The team that I'm on mainly works with web pages. I don't actually have to worry about the stuff that we got Eggplant for. It just so happens that I can also use it to test our web pages. We are not a software development company, we're a transportation company. With a lot of the different tools that we have, what our in-house developers have often done is translate data or move data in file form between databases. Sometimes, the front-end web pages, for example, might end up being a report, or they might verify that customer data has gone in, or they verify fuel prices for comparison to what we paid and to see if we can do better.

Eggplant is not worked into our development cycle. It's a tool that I use to automate tests, but it's not something that we've used in a way that would help accelerate the release of a major enterprise-wide upgrade.

We don't use the solution's AI-driven automated exploratory testing. If we let it loose on our website, it would find a lot of dead ends because if data pages are not updated, and they can't upload that, they can't really go any further. Even if they could upload a couple of files, that requires going off to other systems in the background for testing, and some of it doesn't even go back to a main interface directly. That's not to say that maybe someday we wouldn't work in the model area, but at the moment I personally have been more comfortable and happy to work within the functional model.

Being a developer, the solution has reinforced a lot of my development skills. In the context of the programming acronym SOLID, it is still possible to use programming skills and to make sure that you are writing small snippets of reusable code. It has also shown that QA isn't just manual testing anymore. There's a very big automated component and you really do need people who either want to be developers or are able to develop, because that is what is required now. It's what allows you to make better, more robust tests, and things that can either recover or give you good data on how your systems are performing.

We use it for desktop applications. We are using its latest version, and it can be deployed on-premises as well as on the cloud.

Its scalability is good. It is useful for desktop applications, and it also uses OCR and does image recognition.

Its performance and stability could be better.

I have been using this solution for about a year.

Its stability could be better.

It is easily scalable. We have about seven users who are using this solution. We don't have any plans to increase its usage.

Their support is okay.

It is difficult. You need some kind of training. Its implementation took some time. It took about one to two weeks.

We didn't implement it ourselves. We needed some consultancy.

It probably has a yearly license.

I would recommend it based on the project. I would rate it a six out of 10.

I'm a Test Tool Expert and we're customers of Eggplant Functional and have a good relationship with them. We were the first company in Switzerland to use them. We automate regression tests and there are eight people in the company currently using the product - some are testers and some developers. On a given day there would two or three people using the product, others might use it once a week or once a month. 

The most valuable features would be the image recognition and the OCR. We're also using the API now. we also made a POC for the Selenium WebDriver.

When comparing with other tools, the clear advantage of eggplant is that it is system independent.

When you have release branches and you make feature branches then you can commit. But you cannot make a push, that can only be done on the master and it's not very compatible.
It can also be difficult if you write a lot of scripts and have some images. If you change the name of one of the images then you have to figure out where it is in the script which can be difficult. I would say make the possibilities not only on the image recognition but also on text recognition, something which Tosca has. It would be helpful to be able to work with drivers like Selenium. The implementation of the Selenium driver is not very compatible.

In terms of additional features, it would be helpful to have one package for all testing. 
You have the manager, the AI, then you have functional, and about 10 different packages for installing. 

We haven't had any issues with the stability of this solution. 

Technical support has really been very good. 

We used to use UFT but not anymore, because we have a lot of legacy applications, and we use a lot of different systems that are dependent on each other and because we are independent from where the system hooks up.

The initial setup was very easy. The only thing, which is not so easy is the Eggplant AI integration because it requires an agent to make the connections between functional and the AI server. We had a problem with that but I was able to sort it out. In 99% of cases it works without any issues. 

We had a consultant to assist with implementation and we were very happy with that. 

The product isn't pre-installed. We use xCloud. It really is a very good product, very cool.

I would rate the product a nine out of 10. 

The OCR (Optical Character Cognition) is a very useful feature. It mirrors your phone or your device system.

The scripting is nice and easy to use. The use of the tool is great. You can recreate scripts as well. It can generate scripts based on your actions from the screen.

The setup process is quite lengthy. There's a lot of dependencies. Parts of it need to be centralized.

The reporting function is a bit shallow. The solution does not offer very comprehensive reporting in terms of your test results. The reporting time and the logs are very high level as well. These areas need improvement.

The tool is quite stable. The only issue is connectivity. The RDC connection might be problematic, but I think the call tool itself is quite stable. I haven't really experienced a lot of crashing, or time-outs, or things like that. The stability could be affected by the number of resources available.

The solution is based on a Windows model, where adding users is just a few clicks. It is easy to manage users and add them.

I would rate technical support at three out of five. I don't think they have enough coverage for support. The issues take too long to be resolved. There are also relational issues, location issues, or geolocation issues. For example, in my case, when the support person is in America the response will be the day after the ticket was originally issued. It's too slow of a response because the response team is in America.

The installation is easy, but configuration, based on our project at least, is quite extensive.

We implemented the solution ourselves.

Implementation depends on a lot of factors, but you do need a team that has technical knowledge of the tool. There's a lot of configuration involved when you set up the solution.

I would rate the solution seven out of ten.

I am not a fan because of the reporting functionality and the difficulty in configuring the solution.

We evaluated this solution and began writing code, but we are not comfortable coding in Eggplant so we are not buying it.

We are definitely moving to an open-source solution.

The most valuable feature is the ability to create code from a flow chart, and then run the code through it. 

We found that we had issues regarding the VPN setup, which is one of the reasons that we did not purchase this solution.

We found that the interface is not user-friendly.

We were not able to write code as fast as with the competing open-source software, so that needs to be improved.

We were not able to view all of the resources that were present.

We did not use the product for long enough to rate its stability.

We were in contact with technical support and we found them to be very helpful. They have good knowledge. It is just the product that we are not happy with, and do not feel that it is suitable for our industry.

We did not use another solution prior to this one.

We did not evaluate other options before trying Eggplant.

I would rate this solution a five out of ten.

GUI testing is the strength of the tool. We have been satisfied with the tool, and not only the tool, but the service behind it. The tool works as expected, and the response from eggPlant, as a company, has been quick and substantial.

We are able to now automate tests, which so far have been manual. Now, it is possible to automate them.

• The availability of the support. 
• The internet presentation: If there are any questions, most of the questions can be answered with the web presentation and documentation. 
• The strength of the tool is we almost have no unwanted influence on the system of the test, because Eggplant is based on the reality approach. 
• It can be used for different operating platforms.
• It is easy to use.

A step forward would be to have event support; supporting different events. At the moment, it is more or less linear. We write the code, but from the tool, we do not have support of events in the system. E.g., programming timers where we have different actions in case certain timers expire. If one part of the program is running, we can get a key event. At the moment, we can implement everything in a linear manner, as predicted. 

The world is not linear and can have unpredictable events where you have to react, which should be allowed in a system on a test. The system on a test should be able handle different events at the same time with different elements or servers. At the moment, this is not supported in eggPlant, and it would be a big step forward.

Stability is okay, and has improved from version to version. However, it has not been 100 percent reached, and it will not be reached as long as the software is being developed, used, and new elements are being introduced. Errors and failures can happen, but if you detect them, the support is quick. 

I had a case that they improved over the weekend. Friday evening, I detected a bug, and by Monday morning, it was corrected. From this standpoint, the stability with the support behind it, I am very satisfied.

It is scalable, but it is a matter of money in the pocket. You can scale it, but then you have to have additional licenses. The licensing approach of eggPlant is not the best. 

The support is good. I would rate the technical support between an eight to nine out of 10.

Previously, we used C# based implementation. The reason that we changed was the instability and inflexibility of the tool. If the system on the test has improved and developed, then we needed a test tool which we could adapt in the same or even faster manner. Our previous tool did not help us in this direction. With eggPlant, we have this possibility and can keep all our tests up-to-date all the time.

The initial setup was easy.

I did the initial setup myself.

We did evaluate another US vendor, but I have forgotten their name. They reused something which were the property rights on eggPlant's site, which is why we did not select them.

You should be very clear about what your goals are. If you have this, then check the fit and the match. Afterwards, have a trial period and again check how the tool fits. 

When discussing eggPlant, it is important to use it, implement the scenarios, and run the tool in a regression mode, permanently. Then, you can see the benefit of what you have done and what it is improving. Working with it, this is the important part.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor is the product. The product has to fulfill our requirements. Then, the vendor should be one that we can trust in.

Object recognition on applications with minimal data input, and the fact that it is designed to run on a machine when you can install automation software on the actual device.

Prior to using the product, all regression testing was done manually for our POS system. Now regression test packs are 70% automated. We have also integrated eggPlant into HP ALM.

eggPlants data input is text based and does not easily conform to data driven test, and this makes data management painful. Integration into other vendor tools are important in today’s market, Even though Vendors would like us to use only their toolset, it is not always possible, Integration into JIRA, Mantis, and HP ALM etc. is important as most of us use a combination of them.

I've used it for two years.

Deployment went smoothly, installed on server and on the client with no problems, and upgrading to new versions were also seamless.

We did however have problems when we tried running the scripts on multiple machines concurrently.

We had licence errors even when we had the correct licences and we got connection issues as well when trying to scale.

Service has been impressive time wise, with basic queries I always got a working answer with more complicated questions (integration or data driven) I would get the “Sales answers” but after speaking to a more senior support person I was given a decent answer.

The set-up was straightforward.

We implemented with an in-house team.

I think the licencing model needs to be looked at as it is very expensive, other companies are using/looking at multiple models to assist with various sized companies.

I did evaluate other automation tools, the problem with the other tools is that you had to install it on the machine with the software being tested. At the time eggPlant was the only tool that could be installed on another machine other than the POS machine and create tests and the object recognition and methods were superior at the time.

If the company only writes systems like POS, and GPS – graphical systems, then eggPlant is a great choice. If the company writes a mix of systems POS, SAP, and insurance software, then I would advise you to use a different tool. The other tools are better suited for high data input systems and have built in mechanisms for tables and similar objects.