Professional software development tools company JetBrains s.r.o today announced the official release of Aqua, the first development environment explicitly for helping streamline the software testing process by helping design test automation.

Aqua allows test automation engineers and developers to build all manner of tests quickly during their software development process. These automated tests can be designed for user interfaces, application programming interfaces and other parts of applications with ease. Automated testing is a fundamental part of debugging and making software production ready during development to make sure a project can move forward with fewer errors or security-related issues.

JetBrains introduced Aqua in preview in November 2022. The integrated development environment first supported the Selenium API and Selentide. An IDE is a software development application that combines developer tools with a graphical interface. It’s where developers do most of their work, with a source-code editor, debugger and other build automation tools such as a compiler and interpreter.

Now, the IDE also supports the widely used frameworks, Playwright and Cypress. Aqua also supports all major languages used in test automation, including Java, Kotlin, Python, JavaScript, TypeScript and SQL. Like every other JetBrains IDE, it comes with tools out of the box, such as a test-runner, a logger and artificial intelligence-powered code completion and refactoring capabilities.

“Since Aqua’s launch in preview, we’ve received substantial feedback from our users. They appreciate the concept of an IDE tailored for test automation engineers, recognizing the unique skill set required for testing applications,” said Sergey Kozlovskiy, product marketing manager for JetBrains Aqua. “Another advantage often cited by Aqua users is its support for major languages and frameworks used in test automation. Additionally, our Web Inspector feature, which functions as an embedded browser within the IDE, has been widely appreciated for its convenience as it removes the need for constantly switching to Chrome DevTools.”

Web Inspector allows users to view web applications inside Aqua and capture individual web elements for automated tests. Using the tool developers can generate unique CSS and Xpath locators for selected elements on the web page to add them to the source code with unique IDs. This means that inspections can go deep into web code.

Aqua includes database management capabilities and an editor-based HTTP client for complex requests. With Docker support for containers, Aqua can run, monitor and configure container build images, including running multi-container applications using Docker Compose.

The official latest release of Aqua is available today for test automation engineers to download via the Toolbox App or from the web.

Image: JetBrains