Scriptless Testing

Today, we have a myriad of sophisticated frameworks, dev tools, web services, automation workflows, and so on to power modern applications that win customers.

But how advanced are your QA processes? Test automation is considered as one of the major bottlenecks in DevOps. And without an advanced test automation setup, software quality issues have a chance to magnify easily.

So can scriptless testing help you in any way?

We’ll look at scriptless testing in detail, differentiate it with conventional test automation methods, and discuss how you can use scriptless testing tools to overcome QA bottlenecks.

What is Scriptless Testing?

Scriptless or codeless testing—as the name suggests—is a method to automate tests using tools instead of writing test scripts. The tools are generally based on test automation frameworks like Selenium.

Scriptless testing tool can record a tester’s actions on the application screens as she navigates through features. The test steps that you’d generally write a test script for, the tool will generate the same by recording these actions.

So the scope of scriptless testing is limited to interacting with UI elements. However, a tester can verify end-to-end testing scenarios and ensure critical components without any glitches.

Scriptless testing is limited by the similar limitations to that of the test framework it uses. Which means it might not test things like captcha, barcodes, etc.

Though the name suggests script-free testing, some tools do offer the flexibility to add scripts for complex test cases.

And since scriptless testing is done using tools, different tools come with its own set of testing capabilities and limitations.

How Does Scriptless Testing Work?

The most popular technique for scriptless testing is done by using record & playback. It simply means recording the actions on screen and playing back as a test. Let’s have a brief look at it.

Record and Playback

As you can see in the animation above, while the tester interacts with the web application, test steps are simultaneously generated. These test steps can be later executed on a browser.

Now if you want, you can automate with multiple data inputs (valid or invalid) or leave a field blank to test this critical feature. Similarly, once you create a test case, you can automate various features with different data inputs.

If any feature in a user workflow is updated by the dev team, the related test case can also be quickly updated and automated.

Take this e-commerce workflow for example:

Sign up or Login > Browse Product Catalog > Add Item/s to Cart > Add Shipping & Billing Details > Pay & Checkout > Generate Receipt & Order Details

This end-to-end scenario has multiple features, data inputs, and third-party integrations. Hence, many things can go wrong while features are constantly being updated. But you can easily navigate like a user, record tests, and automate them.

Some scriptless testing tools also offer cross-browser testing and parallel testing. Which means you can execute tests on multiple browsers parallelly.

What are the Advantages of Scriptless Testing over Script-based Testing?

Scriptless testing has significant advantages over script-based testing.

Here are a few of them:

How You Can Benefit From Scriptless Testing?

Although the benefits of scriptless testing are dependent on what tool you choose. There are a few general gains.

Here are a few of them:

• As you can scale test authoring, you can ship quality code faster
• It has a low cost of operations and hence gives back a good RoI
• Collaboration on scriptless testing tools is easier, analysts and business SMEs can also contribute
• Your manual testers or even developers can easily start automating within a day

Conclusion

For the teams finding it difficult to automate tests, scriptless testing can be a good solution. It offers many advantages over conventional test automation methods. While applications are becoming more complex, you may need it to keep up the shipping pace.