It’s no secret that enterprises engaged in software development are in the realm of growing pressure to speed up – introduce new features, shorten release cycles, and generally respond swiftly to changing technology trends.
Consequently, application development has undergone a significant paradigm shift over the years. Today, development environments such as DevOps and Agile favor speed, agility, as well as come in handy in risk reduction.
While this is a huge step in the right direction, application development still encounters delays in essential areas such as testing. A survey conducted by Gitlab in 2018 reveals that testing contributes to 52% of the delays in application delivery. As you can see, this is way above the other steps in the development cycle.
In this article, we shall dig into the root cause of these delays and how codeless testing can make the process easier and quicker.
The root cause of testing bottlenecks
Testing bottleneck first emanates from the use of manual testing, and secondly from all the code that is “thrown around” the QA team way.
In today’s agile development environment where the development and release cycle entails releasing several features and extending a set of features in reiterated releases, testing has become even more complicated.
The problem with manual testing in such an environment is that it is cumbersome and time-consuming. Since humans do the testing it’s also prone to errors.
While automation is hailed as the savior here, automation relies on code yet testers may not necessarily be coders. Instead of simplifying the testing process, testing teams may feel thrown out their comfort zone to tasks that are beyond their job description.
This is where codeless testing comes into play.
Codeless testing as the great savior
Coding from scratch test after test is expensive, time-consuming and requires acquired skill. Codeless testing enables quick and simple creation of tests. No coding skills are needed. This allows the testers to focus on what they do best: testing.
To drive the point home, here is a practical example.
Codeless platforms such as Shopify and Wix have led to an incredible expansion of the web by allowing millions of businesses to set up an online presence quickly and effortlessly.
Codeless platforms are also making strides with the likes of Filemaker, Salesforce, and Nentext to offer drag and drop solutions to optimize and speed up the efficiency of large scale administrative tasks.
But, how does codeless testing work?
Codeless test automation works in a similar way to enterprise codeless platforms. Both use automated code generation to simplify complex tasks traditionally achieved by coding.
In test automation, a tester visually binds elements that represent clicks in the software web application by creating a flow. On the other hand, in codeless testing, the tester goes through motions of the scenario that is being tested, and the code for the test is generated under the hood.
The process can get more technical than this, but we will stop there. After all, that is the idea with codeless; to allow testers to focus their efforts on testing functionality and evaluating user experience instead of struggling with test creation.
Benefits of codeless testing
- Effortless document processes and change
Codeless testing, which includes the visual description of a process as well as documentation of how that process is executed, significantly reduces the effort required in testing. Automated tests are documented with logs and videos using advanced testing practices. All actions and events can be recorded in audit trails. - Advanced adoption with a codeless test automation
Unlike code based custom frameworks, the beauty of codeless testing is that it can be used as a complete solution for automation needs across organizations. Using a center of excellence set up to advance an automation testing process simplifies the process of sharing knowledge and best practices across projects for collaboration. - Outspread the scope of automation
The codeless automation process makes it easier to support various types of applications, including desktop, web, and virtual applications. This means that automated tests can include different interfaces across applications as part of or beyond the project. This level of flexibility makes it easy to measure the amount of automation from one to a number of applications. This is especially true for applications that include testing automation between projects. - Lower maintenance cost and sale automation
It is easy to reunite automated flows into reusable parts that can be utilized as sub-flows across testing the use cases. Should changes be made into reused sub-flows, the changes will be effective throughout all testing use cases holding the module. This means that most of the time, there is no need to correct the automation flows every time changes are made to the system under test because codeless test automation relies on native identification of the objects of test use cases.
Since automating tests essentially follows current best practices and business rules, it is easier to scale and maintain the test automation cost. - Compatible with the speed of the development cycle
Graphical UI workflows are used in the creation of codeless test automation. The code is designed to simplify the learning and implementation of automation.
As soon as UI development is done, the testing process can embark on automating the use cases. No time needs to be wasted going through difficult coding and frameworks.
As a result, it is possible to match the speed of the development cycle with continuous integration and testing in agile.
Final Word
All said and done; codeless testing can significantly help you save on time as well resources used in monotonous tests that are known to derail developers and testers.
While the process may not be completely code-free, your team has better chances to shine in the QA process. This simply because codeless testing is: easy to understand therefore you spend less time on automation, time-saving since no code experience is required, cost-effective and has a friendly interface that facilitates the whole process of testing.
| Published on Java Code Geeks with permission by Arun Kulkarni, partner at our JCG program. See the original article here: Codeless Testing: Everything You Should Know
Opinions expressed by Java Code Geeks contributors are their own. |
