Rainforest

"Easier to write and maintain than automated UI tests"

Overall: Rainforest provides end-to-end testing without the high cost of dedicated QA resources, and without the high cost of writing and maintaining automated UI tests.

Pros: It is easy to write set up the tests, to run them, and to edit them as needed. No special knowledge or skill is needed for any of this. The customer support is phenomenal, because you can always chat the Rainforest team and they get back to you right away. Also it is easy to schedule runs, and they have really improved the visibility of results, as in, you can see exactly what happened when a tester went through the test including a screen shot, the directions given, and then notes from the tester about anything their description of any problem observed. Multiple (usually 3+) testers are assigned to a test per browser when you "run" a test.

Cons: False positives and false negatives are common. Mostly this is not a big deal, because they have multiple testers run through the same test in the same browser, so if one tester misunderstands the directions or makes some error, the Rainforest algorithm will automatically ignore that tester's bug report, so that you don't get a false negative for the overall run. But sometimes multiple testers will make multiple, different mistakes during a run, resulting in a false negative (i.e., a report of a run failure), even though the software actually worked fine. Oftentimes if a step is proving confusing to testers, you can easily re-word the test step to make it work out better. We actually set up 50 users on our test systems, because when you run a few tests using a few different browsers, you want them all to use unique user logins so that their work doesn't conflict. You also have to think about how to design the tests such that multiple users can create and find objects within your web app such that their simultaneous usage does not cause conflicts. Since the testers are real people using a real web app, you cannot run too many test configurations at the same time, otherwise you will get dozens of people hitting the (test) server simultaneously -- and who wants to pay for enough test servers of high bandwidth in order to handle high loads of traffic, when all you really want to test for these sorts of tests is application functionality and logic?

"Makes a QA team extremely Capable"

Overall: This tool makes a team of 2 QA employees, a team of a million testers. Its incredible.

Pros: This tool allows a team to test across multiple platforms and evniroments in a way that would not be capable without a massive team. Extremely easy for someone without a coding background to pick up.

Cons: Can't say about thing about this software, makes my team extremely more capable.