The Paradox of Test Automation

Test Automation is enhancing at a great rate. It has come a long way in the past decade. Many tools have been developed with reducing the coding involved as one of their major objectives. A lot of plugins can be found which helps testers to find the element locators ( like xpath , css etc ) in a faster way.?

These advancements have resulted in increasing the coverage of Automation Testing, develop interests among testers to adopt and learn automation. Efficient locators and optimized tools have also reduced the time of testing in such a way that many people intend to rely on automation completely.?

But Is there something missing ?

Most of the times, test automation are performed in an obtuse way. Let me share an example of the cliched login page, which I have created for the sole purpose of representing the problem statement:

Summary of the Problem Statement

"For a scenario where we have to verify login, we validate the presence of elements using their UI attributes. But does that really guarantee that they are shown as per the Design? If No, then How can we achieve this ? After entering credentials, when we tap on signIn button, how do we verify the user is logged in ? By finding the elements that only a signedIn user can see ? If all elements are verified by locators, it may take longer and if only primary elements are used, that may leave chance for bugs, so what should be ideally done ? Do we verify the presence of the element after each tap action ? "

What I feel is that we still have a long way to go in making Automation Testing more intuitive and we should think of increasing the accuracy of our tests along with its coverage and speed of execution.

Feel free to post your experiences and how you overcome common automation problems. Would love to get some answers from you.

Thank You!