A Promising Solution For Quality Assurance

As new products emerge, the demands of a customer keep increasing and

businesses must constantly evolve to stay in the competition.

Many IT experts have predicted that in 2020, the knowledge gap between the Testers and Developers will be narrowed, Agile and DevOps will continue to see high adoption, and human intervention should be minimalized for more time to focus on business strategies.

In such a scenario, codeless test automation emerged as a promising benchmark that every software development team must apply.

Shift From Manual Testing To Automated Testing

Manual testing relies on a tester to try out different scenarios and inputs to find defects in a product. This is a step-by-step task that gives the testers little space for exploratory testing and reporting, especially when Agile processes show no sign of decline.

On the other hand, Automated testing provides both the organization as well as the testers with predefined actions, comparable results and intelligent reports with more significant efficiency.

 

Testing Bottlenecks

As test automation is rapidly becoming an alternative solution for Manual testing in 2020, more companies are looking for tools and strategies to successfully apply automation. This trend has led to the significant growth of test automation tools, namely Selenium, Katalon Studio, Appium, and many more.

However, to fully utilize these automation tools, the QA teams must have sufficient programming skills. In addition to that, businesses are becoming more agile, products are getting updated at a more frequent pace, and that indeed makes testing even more important.

It is a challenge for businesses to find testers and QA professionals with extensive programming skills to fully leverage Test Automation Tools.

#1) Low Learning Curve: With codeless testing, QA engineers exploit the UI elements and user-like behaviors to build-up their test cases, by taking away the burden of coding and dealing with complex automation frameworks.

#2) Reduce Effort on Mundane and Repetitive Tasks: When no time or effort is spent on writing test scripts, the team can focus more on functionality and user experience rather than investing their effort into Test case creation.

#3) Less Unnecessary Scripting: Codeless testing tools mainly use UI and visual factors while building test cases, thereby allowing the QA engineers to begin GUI testing as soon as the developers have finished UI development. As the technique relies on native identification of the objects in the test cases, QA engineers don’t have to read or write codes to start their automation tests – if this process is unnecessary.

#4) Cost-effective: Codeless testing skips the developer dependency parts. When the QA engineers can already perform testing by themselves, the developers won’t have to be involved in creating UI tests. This will considerably free up room for the developers to focus on other responsibilities.

Low To No Requirement Of Programming Skills

2020 marks the new age of Codeless Testing. As record and playback tools have started to show limitations, the product teams need a new solution i.e. Codeless Test Automation.

It takes away the burden of programming for testers and allows them to focus on their crafts rather than dwelling on mastering the coding skills required for most automation frameworks.

Codeless testing tools require less programming skills while still ensuring Coverage, Scalability, and Maintenance capability. Testers are not programmers, and Automation engineers who are capable of the job are scarce. This indeed makes codeless test automation the ultimate choice for product teams.

Built-in Applications Of AI/ML

The two hot terms of 2019 i.e. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning continue to be in the main focus of businesses and QA teams in the current year as well. AI applications will add significant benefits and make things easier for testers and QA teams as they scale up.

AI supports Test case maintenance, Risk assessment, Issue detection, and Prioritization. AI deals with the piling up of log files, thereby revealing the insights of issue origin along with the ways to deal with them.

“Smart” Analytics: Automated And Shareable Reports

Speaking of codeless and AI/ML application, “Smart” testing is the next criteria that a comprehensive automation tool ought to have.

Dealing with hefty chunks of log history and data is not an enjoyable task. AI-assisted dashboards and analytics help the end-users oversee the entire product quality and performance. Some automation solutions also enable Monitoring test cases, Test results, and Execution time, along with sharing results across team members in a project.

This means that QA engineers, Developers, and Product managers will have a clearer picture of the status of each execution, reduction in workflow disruption, and a constant feedback loop between departments.

Although there have been many test automation tools introduced in the market up until this point, the tools that actually support codeless testing are still very few in number.

Katalon Studio is one of the few mature platforms built for Codeless Test Automation. Unlike the tools that are heavily code-based, Katalon Studio allows the end-users to Create tests, Manage test projects, View results in smart dashboards and analytics, Collaborate with team members, and Integrate with a myriad of CI/CD tools.

The Katalon ecosystem consists of:

• Katalon Studio: Build test scripts and execute test cases for Web, API, Mobile, and Desktop applications for free.
• Katalon Studio Enterprise: A paid, advanced license of Katalon Studio for large teams and scalable projects.
• Katalon Runtime Engine: An add-on to execute test cases in command-line interface and console mode.
• Katalon TestOps: Export test results and View from dashboards, with the assistance of smart analytics.

The great news is that you can do all these things in one single platform, and thanks to its rich set of features. Moreover, all the features of Katalon Studio are designed for both the users with and without coding experience. Thus anyone, at any level of expertise, can start testing immediately.

• Powerful Record and Playback: Test recording is the easiest way for newcomers to start test automation. Identifying objects on applications is time-consuming. Katalon Web Recorder Utility captures your actions being performed on an application and converts them into runnable codes in the back-end.
• Behavior-Driven Development (BDD): BDD is a methodology that has been widely adopted by Agile teams. This practice helps to close the technical and communication gap between the team members. QA engineers, Developers, Product Managers, and Business analysts can collaborate in one project with ease. Katalon Studio supports Cucumber Runner for BDD and integration with Jira.
• Smart XPath: When an application changes, one of the things that is too hard to fix is the element location. Katalon Smart XPath uses AI to automatically locate the web or app elements to help you cope with constant changes in every new release.
• Smart Wait: This is a brand-new feature in Katalon Studio 7. This feature handles the Wait issues in Selenium. Katalon Studio will automatically wait for all the front-end processes of a web page to complete before moving on to the next steps. All execution results will be consistent and QA engineers can save a vast amount of time investigating false alarms.

• Image-based Recognition: This is considered as a breakthrough feature in test automation and is under development. In the first release of this feature, the end-users can interact with the application elements with keywords, instead of writing scripts to locate them.
• Dual-editor Interface: The manual and scripting options in Katalon Studio enable automation novices to start automating right away, and the automation experts to write advanced test scripts.

From a business perspective, for Large teams & Enterprises, reducing effort on manual and repetitive tasks can also lower the maintenance costs and drive better ROI.

All the features in Katalon Studio are designed to be scalable. No matter what your industry or the level of your team member’s programming skill is, Katalon Studio allows you and your team to perform QA tasks with the most minimal effort, at any stage of continuous testing.

The tool’s capabilities to scale with the teams/companies of any size is proven through their product development strategy:

• Complete Application Under Test (AUT) Coverage: Katalon Studio now supports desktop app testing, along with Web apps, Mobile Apps, and API testing. By providing such a complete solution, the Katalon team shows that they are able to accommodate their users in all scenarios i.e. even when their project requirements change.
• Test Objects Sharing: Import and export test artifacts across multiple test projects without having to re-write test scripts or start from scratch. This feature is supposed to avoid the time wasted on reinventing the wheel for teams with a large number of testers.
• Test Objects Refactoring: Allows end-users to reuse test cases and test objects. This feature also supports viewing and managing the unused test objects within a few clicks.
• Rich Technical Resources to Improve Testing Skills: With a complete set of documentation and a community of worldwide testers, Katalon offers a great opportunity for everyone to level up their testing skills. More than a codeless testing tool, Katalon Studio is built as a designated solution for teams that want to convert Manual testers to Automation testers with minimal effort.

Moreover, Katalon Studio is trusted by more than 65,000 companies all over the world. Many of them are large Fortune 500 enterprises – AT&T, 53Bank, CVS Health, General Motors, are a few among the list.

In 2019, Katalon Studio was ranked as one of the best test automation software by Gartner Peer Insights, with more than 500 positive reviews from thought leaders and industry experts.

Codeless test automation is going to be a fundamental practice to adopt for software development teams, and a criterion to have for test automation solution providers. Codeless test automation allows the IT and business teams to align their levels of expertise, reduce bottlenecks, and save time and effort on maintenance costs.

Packed with features that support Codeless Test Automation, Katalon Studio is one of the must-adopt solutions to try out. The new version, Katalon Studio 7, comes with many major updates and improvements tailored for the needs of medium and large teams.

Regardless of your role in your project, you don’t want to miss out on trying this tool in 2020.