What is Codeless Automation Testing and why it is the Future!
Testing has always been a bane of product development cycle. In an era where a single software bug can cause massive financial losses, quality assurance testing is paramount for any software product no matter how small or how big.
In current agile development cycle where development and release cycle involve releasing a set of features and extending those sets in iterated releases, testing has become even more complicated. Manual testing, though very useful in many cases, fails under the deluge of features, buttons, links, accordions, javascripts, and integrations. Add performance testing, and user experience testing to the equation and you get no choice but to automate the testing process. And that’s where codeless testing comes into place and the subject of this post.
Automation Testing and Codeless Testing
Automation testing is a necessity of an agile development process. It involves creating a separate software framework to test the primary solution through automated means. The complex a solution is, the complexity of the testing framework becomes. Automation testing becomes critical once you get to a stage where every release requires execution of thousands of test cases and actions. Traditional automation testing involves writing separate execution software scripts for each test case, and then executing them through a separate software setup dedicated to running, monitoring, and logging the test cases.
For large projects or projects having a fast release cycles, creating test environment, and writing test scripts itself take a huge amount of time and resources. Which ultimately defeats the whole purpose of automation testing which was aimed at reducing testing times and testing resources.
A solution to this problem is codeless testing. Codeless testing is creating automation tests without writing a single piece of code. This approach has been steadily evolving with new innovation on technology, focusing more on around reducing the coding process and making it more user friendly. The ultimate aim is to make the setup so easy to use so that automating a test scenario takes very less amount of time and require almost no coding efforts. Making the process true codeless testing.
There are many tools already in the market that aims to achieve this objective, however to term them Codeless is still not very accurate. The correct term would something like script less, because in the background, most tools would just provide the testers one more abstraction layer, which would translate user actions and instructions to testing scripts which in turn drive test automations. This abstraction layer is more user friendly with good graphical interfaces, that will make the testing process easier and more manageable. So even though the user don’t have to write a lot of code personally, the tool still runs on scripts.
How Codeless Testing Works
There are multiple approaches behind codeless testing. The two most prominent ones involving recording manual tests and playing it back, and creating structured test flow diagrams that are used to run tests. The record and play approach being the most popular one right now and especially favored by web based products.
The idea behind the approach is that a tester manually performs a test, which the tool records click by click. The tool then create scripts to automate the test itself. The testers can also edit the scripts, and the testing process to best suite their requirements.
What is The Future of Codeless Automation Kill Automation Testing
For the foreseeable future, need for automation coders would not diminish. Codeless testing would be a tool for automation testers to fast track their jobs rather than replace their jobs. In unforeseen future, the tools will become smart enough that they will completely eliminate the need for test script coding, allowing testing instructions to be directly passed on to the system in a complete codeless package. Right now though, automation functional testing is the most important requirement of any agile software development process.