Over the years, the role of software testing has gained a prominent place in SDLC. The major shift towards Agile & DevOps development methodologies has expedited adoption of Test Automation strategies to bring-in speed to meet the quick go to market strategies. Software testing until last two decades was a simple exercise which was performed manually. However, it has become more complex now owing to the emergence of new technologies, platforms, browsers, devices and new development methodologies. Companies in order to meet these complex software testing requirements and to reduce their overall cost and maintenance of test cycles have realized the need to replace their traditional testing approach with Test Automation. But then considering the need of agility and to reduce the dependencies on programming skills from Testers, and to improve the communication between technical and non-technical teams (Business Analysts), slowly Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) evolved from Test-Driven Development (TDD). Writing test cases in a common language led to collaboration efficiency. This increased the demand for Codeless Automation, making it more popular approach. 

Codeless Automation – 101 

Codeless Automation means automating your tests without really having any knowledge of coding. Testers can visually create automated tests using a drag and drop interface, and run them on multiple browsers and work environments, simultaneously. Some of the popular tools are developed on top of open source solution, Selenium and will require zero effort from the QA team, integrates with the third-party applications, makes building test cases easier than before, monitors your web page performance and will cost less than hiring a manual tester. A few examples are Katalon Studio, CloudQA, Leapwork, Tosca, Perfecto, Mabl, Usetrace, etc.  

For QA teams, Codeless Automation reduces the complexity of writing test scripts, so they can create and execute fully automated test scenarios without coding. For developers, Codeless Automation testing makes test creation and execution substantially faster thereby saving time and focus more on product development and innovation. If automating a test case using Selenium takes a minimum of 6 hours, whereas with Codeless Automation may take only an hour. In addition, some of the Codeless testing tools use AI / ML for automated error classification, self-healing, etc making it the future in DevOps environments.

Codeless Automation workings – how? 

Codeless Automation Testing can work on different approaches. The most commonly used are the record and play and creating structured test flow diagrams using drag and drop interface. The testers can edit the scripts created by the tool to best suit their requirements. This enables them to meet the shorter time to market goal.

Codeless Automation Testing Tools: 

• CloudQA: Easy to use cloud-based tool for creating tests using a visual editor which creates an easily maintainable dynamic test model. With record & playback option, it records the tests and captures all the actions during site navigation. It also enables running tests in parallel across browsers. With high test coverage, it supports data driven testing. It facilitates reuse of test scripts for load testing and synthetic monitoring.

• Tricentis Tosca:  It is an enterprise grade continuous testing platform that provides no-code approach for end to end test automation. With support for more than 160+ technologies, Tosca provides robust test automation capabilities with maximum test coverage at ease. Leveraging their AI-driven model-based testing platform, one can accelerate the testing cycle and eliminate the challenges of test automation solutions which relay on strong programming skills.

• Katalon Studio: It is known for generating tests automatically. Its recorder facilitates recording tester`s actions on web or mobile application and creates the test scripts. It has built-in framework and predefined test methods to accelerate seamless test script development. With self-healing support backed by AI, it provides capabilities for easy test maintenance. Katalon Studio supports web, mobile and Desktop applications. 

• Perfecto: It is a cloud-based solution with record and playback ability and built-in integrations to several popular CI servers. It offers a high-speed infrastructure and comprehensive reporting dashboard that is accessible across geographies. It provides scalable solution by having seamless integration to Selenium Grid. It offers ML capabilities to address the object maintenance issues in the test scripts.

• Selenium IDE: It is one of the most commonly used record and playback automation testing tool. The test scripts created can be exported to Selenium WebDriver for test execution.  The tool can be extended through plugins.

• LeapWork : It is one of the popular solution for no-code test automation enabled by their visual language of flowcharts. With simple, visual building blocks, data driven tests or end to end UI test cases can be created maximizing the test coverage. With intuitive management features and straight forward integration with CI/CD pipeline, it works across all technologies.

Not just limited to these tools, there are several other popular Codeless test automation tools like Ranorex, SimplifyQA, AutonomiIQ, etc available in the market. Codeless test automation being the future to improve test efficiency, reusability, maintainability and agility, there is a substantial increase in the new codeless test automation tools in the market, every day.

Key benefits of Codeless Automation 

The main benefit of Codeless Automation is self-maintenance. Using Artificial Intelligence powered technology which eliminates maintenance time and cost as it automatically monitors changes in the code. It creates a dynamic test model that can be easily updated to reflect the changes. Codeless Testing leverages Machine Learning to self-correct object maintenance issues within code, saving time and cost. Codeless Testing on Cloud allows the team to meet its speed, scalability and collaboration needs throughout the software development life cycle (SDLC). Increased reusability and test coverage make it the best candidate for Agile and DevOps environments.

The Future of Codeless Automation 

Test automation for sure will help in accelerating regression testing, reduction in repetitive testing efforts, but codeless test automation will ensure that we achieve the desired results faster. Codeless test automation is simpler, smarter and better way to automate and drive expected ROI. Care should be taken to identify the right codeless automation tool that supports the technology in which the application is built and make sure it comes with all the required features like cross-browser compatibility, integration with different bug tracking tools, multilingual support, scheduler, etc. that ensures reliable and efficient test automation. 

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