Seems like the debate in the world of test automation tools is over.
If few years back HP QTP/UFT (formerly WinRunner) was the standard and most commonly used tool for test automation in the QA space, those days are over.
The shift toward Agile, Devops and such trends together with the digital transformation which includes multi platform testing of Mobile, Web, IOT in a very short amount of times changed the tools landscape and the testing requirements.
See below a snapshot of the top required testing tools which show that the shift already started in 2011 where Selenium passed HP tools in the market adoption.
Source: http://www.seleniumguide.com/
The requirements today are that testing is done as early as possible in the project life cycle (SDLC) and to enforce this process, developers ought to play a significant role – Testing is now being developed and executed by all Agile team members including developers, testers, ops people and others.
In order for the shift and the adoption to grow the tools need to be tightly integrated into the developers environment (IDE’s) which in the digital space might be Eclipse, Android Studio, Visual Studio, Xcode or other cross platform IDE’s like PhoneGap or Titanium.
The additional aspect of test framework adoption such as Selenium and Appium lies in the Open-Source nature of these tools. The flexibility of such open source tools to get extended by developers according to their needs is a great deal compared to closed testing tools such as UFT which are disconnected from the IDE and development environments.
We shall continue to monitor the tools space and movement, but seems like the open source tools is becoming standard for Agile, DevOps practitioners which find these tools suitable for their shift left activities, keeping up with the market dynamics and competition, as well as great enablers for quality and velocity maintainability.
To get some heads up into what is the future of Selenium, and how are the efforts moving on toward making the web browsers drivers (Chrome, Firefox, IE etc.) standard and managed by the browser vendors, refer to this great session (courtesy of Applitools)
http://testautomation.applitools.com/post/120437769417/the-future-of-selenium-andreas-tolfsen-video
Continuous Testing and DevOps Blog 