Codeless Test Automation: Is this The Future?

Our daily work environment consists of methodologies like DevOps and Agile.
A demand of rapid release cycles puts manual test in a lack of pace and organizations have been adopting Test Automation to help reduce time-consuming tasks of manual testing.

However, automating large collections or suites is time-consuming.
We have to take into account that the majority of the Test Automation frameworks do rely on coding and more important, less than the majority of a QA team got the knowledge of coding.

Like Test Automation was adopted to help reduce manual testing, Codeless Test Automation can be adopted to help Testers and others in the Agile team to execute automated tests without having to learn to code.

What is Codeless Test Automation?

Codeless Test Automation is a practice of creating automated tests where the testers are not required to write code. A typical approach can be record and playback of tests where the tool(s) automatically record the tests and turn them into scripts while the tester performs them manually.

These scripts can then be used again and again.

But it’s important to mention that Codeless Test Automation is really not 100% codeless, there will most likely be some instances where the created scripts will require some manual coding.

Do we need Codeless Test Automation?

Traditional Test Automation is complex and needs specific expertise but organizations either don’t have the budget or are willing to hire Test Developers / Test Engineers that got the knowledge and expertise in coding, maintaining test scripts, different tools and frameworks. We have been seeing teams that have put developers in charge of automating tests where the results have been that the tests have never been fully completed due to conflicting development tasks.

Codeless Test Automation can benefit an organization which  have feared Test Automation by its required time, maintenance and skill-based requirements. Adoption of a Codeless Test Automation tool will help these organizations to achieve an automation results more quicker and in less time.

But it’s also worth to mention that Codeless Test Automation shouldn’t be thought of a replacement for Traditional Test Automation. Using a codeless tool for a specific suite of tests – like regression tests will allow dedicated Test Engineers / Test Developers to focus on more complex automation tasks. To maximize the speed and quality of automation, both traditional and codeless could go hand-in-hand. 

Benefits of Codeless Test Automation

Codeless Test Automation tools can help minimizing the effort a QA team will put into setting up an automation framework but there are also other key points an organization can benefit from:

• Low maintenance: Tests are created on the fly with ‘click-and-test’ and are made re-useable. Reduces the code-based debugging which leads to easier test-maintenance.
• Time-saving: Tests are created rapidly and even non-technical testers/users can create an execute automated tests.
• No coding-background required: A traditional test automation framework requires a Test Engineer / Test Developer to setup, create tests and maintain, these usually hold a background as a developer. Unlike traditional test automation, codeless doesn’t require any coding skills or developer background.
• Freeing up resource-pool: Testers can spend more time on research-based-testing, analyzing test results.

Conclusion

Codeless Test Automation brings a number of benefits within the testing process and is easy to adapt to Agile projects.
The elimination of the requirement for knowledge-of-coding can help Agile teams to collaborate even better but you need a strategy to create a foundation for codeless which will help to scale and expand test automation analysis.