Software development is a rapidly evolving computer science activity focused on creating, designing, deploying, and supporting software. Test automation is a practice of automatically reviewing and validating the software product.
Traditional test automation practice, called Code-based automation testing, highly depends on the scripts written by technical experts. These technical experts can be testers or other team members who are aware and experienced in programming languages, frameworks, and tools. Code-based test automation is relatively complex, with high maintenance requirements. Code-based test automation is slow since it requires a lot of planning and infrastructure setup.
To minimize the disadvantages and drawbacks of code-based test automation, one of the newer addition to test automation is codeless test automation.
What is codeless automation testing?
Code-less, no-code, or script-less automated testing is the practice of creating automated tests without writing a single line of code.
Codeless platforms relieve developers and testers from the time-intensive coding required to automate tests. To expedite their test creation and maximize testing reliability, codeless testing has become a great option to embed into their testing responsibilities. In contrast to code-based test automation, teams of all skill levels can perform codeless automation testing.
Testers do not need to know how to code during the codeless automation process. Instead, they leverage specialized tools to help develop the proper test scripts. Codeless testing still requires testers to understand software testing and product development insight.
Benefits of Codeless Testing
- Ease of Use
One of the core advantages of codeless testing is the ease of use. As testers do not require coding experience, users such as business analysts, product owners, and manual testers benefit from testing the software according to their requirements. With added collaboration and testing objectives, software quality and viability are easily improved. - Efficiency
Codeless testing is a much more efficient way of testing compared to the traditional. As testers do not need to code scripts and can incorporate testing templates, overall efficiency in getting these testing cycles done is much quicker. It is directly reflected in much faster development cycles while retaining good quality in software. - Collaboration
Collaboration is critical in getting good-quality software out. With no coding required, the kind of testers you can have can be anyone that intends to test the software. As more stakeholders are involved in measuring software viability, reaching above standards is inevitable. - Maintenance
Codeless testing can reduce maintenance costs in comparison to traditional coded testing. As these codeless testing tools come pre-built with exception handling and test management, manual work is drastically reduced, directly reflecting the time and money saved in the long run. - Accuracy
Traditional coded testing often comes with native errors such as typos and syntax errors. It is also one of the advantages that codeless testing does not involve any coding practices. It lets you design the testing scenario you want to automate through GUI.
Codeless testing also comes with inbuilt validation features to ensure testing scenarios are complete and viable. - Scalability
Codeless testing tools are built scalable and customizable. With coding not being a requirement to do this testing, the range of testers significantly widens, which equally widens the test coverage and objectives. As they do not have to code, testing possibilities are limitless for anyone.
When to Use Codeless Testing
Codeless testing suits many projects, including web, mobile, and desktop applications. This is mainly used for projects that follow agile development cycles requiring rapid testing cycles.
Codeless automation testing never completely replaces all manual testing. There will always be tests that need the "human touch", such as tests that have third-party dependencies and complex prerequisites from a setup perspective.
By implementing codeless testing, you will have a combination of code-based, codeless, and manual tests working in parallel.
Conclusion
In most cases, code-less automation testing is a better option for time-consuming, special skills required for code-based automation testing.
Thushitha Withanage
Senior Software Quality Assurance Lead