It is a good one as far as I have studied it. It covers a lot of platforms and gives testers a good opportunity to automate.

Since I have studied its coverage and I have not used it in detail. So, in terms of coverage, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. It covers many platforms.

My advice is to make sure you have the budget for it. That's the only advice. It just goes with technology. Would you buy Beats headphones or would you buy some headphones at the gas station or the petrol station down the street? You'd probably go for the Beats, right? You'd probably go there because it's what you get. The money you pay is what you get, it's that type of investment. Here's the thing, Eggplant is pretty awesome. It is the best tool out there. TestComplete can still do the same thing, but with TestComplete, you've got to have junior developers for it. You can get it cheaper, but if you have some developers that know how to write object oriented languages, then you could step in and be very effective with it. QF-test and Katalon are cheap software. But at the same time, they have a learning curve that requires calls to their support. And then their support will bill you in the end so it's money out of your pocket.

When you go into GUI automation, you have to ask yourself, "How much money do I have and what is the best return on an investment that I'm going to get?" I have to say that if you don't have a lot of money, then maybe QF-test or Katalon would be your way to go. And you're still looking for a GUI solution. If you have developers that are skilled, then maybe you go with TestComplete or you step into Appium or Selenium, depending on your application.

There is a tool for everything, but there's one tool that rules them all. And I have to say that it's Eggplant. I'm not going to lie, Eggplant is not only a tool for people that don't know what they're doing with automation it is also a tool for developers, because I've seen developers pull it right out of the box and slay it on the first five minutes. Like, "Oh. Yeah, I know how to do this." 

On a scale of 1 to ten, I would give Eggplant Functional a 10 out of 10, even with some of the issues. Like I said, it's the dog's bollocks. It's what I would pick every time if the finances and everything were there, boom, all the time, any day, every day.

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. 

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. 

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.

Around 15 technical staff members are required for the solution's deployment and maintenance.

Users must do a POC before using Eggplant Test.

Overall, I rate Eggplant Test a seven out of ten.

I'm not sure of the exact version number I'm using. 

Their website is really good, and there is so much information on their website. They have many examples, and then there are many ways to solve problems. There are tutorials for every level of user. Before you buy the tool, you can watch the lectures, and then you can ask them for a POC. For us, they sent us the pilot tools for weeks or months. If you are skilled in UI or function testing, you can try it out.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

Eggplant Digital Automation Intelligence is the market leader in AI automation. They independently worked across every technology.

My approach while identifying the tool to use is simple. If you want to see the performance, and you want to improve productivity, then it would be best to choose the commercial tool. If you don't want to improve productivity and want to stay on the same line, it is best to use an open-source solution, such as Selenium. Selenium requires skilled people to use it. Which is very difficult to find in the market at this time. Additionally, it requires a lot of time for maintenance. To reduce all these costs, you should choose a commercial tool. 

My advice to others is to understand the solution very well. Understand your use cases and try to fit them. It is important to see whether your use cases fit into the tool which you are looking for and based on that you can go ahead and use it.

I rate Eggplant Digital Automation Intelligence an eight out of ten.

My advice would be try it before you buy it. They offer a trial copy and you have plenty of time to build some prototypes. The speed at which you can actually be up and running is great, so that during the trial period you can very quickly find out how well the solution is going to meet your needs. See if you can build a prototype that meets your needs quickly and if you can do that, then you're going to be in good shape.

We use the basic, core functionality of Eggplant Digital Automation Intelligence, where we develop tests in the user interface and usually execute them via the command line. We're developing those tests manually to serve our needs. We've had some exploratory sessions on the solution's AI features and that's something that I'm sure we'll be diving into further in the near future. But we have been able to meet most of our needs with the more core functions of the software.

If someone who is not using Eggplant said to me, “We are comfortable with automating 70 percent of our linear paths," I would say that we had a similar quote from our QA manager, seven years ago when I decided to look for a solution. The QA manager was satisfied with what was being done and didn't want to really put forth the effort to look for an additional or different solution from what he had. With a little bit of work, I was able to discover Eggplant as a solution and build a prototype and automate the work that was being done. It was very eye-opening to our company and was received very well. You're doing yourself a disservice if you're not constantly looking for better solutions and improvements in your current processes.

The biggest lesson that I've learned from using Eggplant Digital Automation Intelligence is that it pays to do your research and look for solutions. When you've got a use case or an issue that is presenting itself, do your research and find out what other people are doing and what else is out there that may help with solving the problem at hand. In most cases, you're not the only one who has that problem. Doing some research to see who's doing what and the experiences that others have had with the different solutions out there is a great way to find a good solution like Eggplant.

We've been using this product for quite a while and we've found that it's able to address the use cases that we throw at it. We haven't run into any situations that I'm aware of where we earmarked Eggplant for a solution but were unable to apply it.

When I started programming in Eggplant, everybody who looked at my screen just saw a lot of code. But when I activated it by pressing play, and that code was working in the background and started doing all the tests that a human would do, everybody said, "Hey, Eggplant is doing it. Cool." Everybody liked it. But the processes behind that, which needed to be programmed, was the part nobody liked.

Right now, I'm totally convinced about Eggplant, and I try to convince others in my company about it. There are some other tools I have to evaluate, and to give my opinion about, but no doubt Eggplant will still be my favorite.

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.

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.

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.

I would rate this solution a five out of ten.

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