Silk Test Interview Question 73: Silktest vs QTP comparasion?

I'm always surprised to read in the requirement for Automation Test Engineer something like "5+ years test automation experience, including contributing to automation framework development and developing and maintaining Seque SilkTest or HP / Mercury QTP test suites". For me it means that hiring company does not have any test automation tools at all and you will be the very first test automation engineer to hire. In the same time I consider this QA interview questions "describe advantages and disadvantages of HP QTP vs SilkTest" as perfectly valid software engineer interview question.

Let's take a look on both test automation tool and compare QTP vs Silktest without any comparison tables.

HP QTP and Silktest have one major drawback in common there is no a single HP QTP book or SilkTest book published yet except tutorials you get in the box. It means in case you want to advance your career as test automation engineer you have to take an expensive courses.

HP QTP fits more for less technical tester who will just try to do a basic record-and-playback. The Quality Assurance Engineer with object oriented programming experience should select SilkTest as tool in case s/he wants to treat automated testing as real development project.

Borland SilkTest works with 4Test scripting language and Java programming language with a help of Silk4j Eclipse Plugin, while HP QTP works with a scripting language implemented on top of VBScript. In both cases you need to have someone familiar with language. Consider to take a look on Selenium, because Selenium allow to code test scripts in Java, .Net, Perl, Python, Ruby and PHP.

Most critical part in selection test automation tool is what type of application you want to test. SQA Engineer should evaluate HP QTP, Silktest and probably Selenium against testing requirement and then make a decision.

Update
A few QTP books have been released recently on market, for detailed review look at review Best Books for QTP

SilkTest interview questions for QA Testers