TL; DR, You can build UI test automation without mastering any of the programming languages.
In every well-designed tech team, there is a balanced amount of developers taking care of the web, internal system, and applications. Next to them, ideally, are product owners, tech leads, designers and software testers.
Being the only QA person in my team gave me hard times, but also a lot of freedom in my actions, decisions, strategies and, most significantly, allowed me to try out new approaches.
In our project, we did not have any UI tests in place, only some FE unit tests. My task was to automate the UI for web desktop and mobile.
Coming from a manual testing background with little programming knowledge, I had to find a solution to automate our UI with the resources available.
How did I start? Baby steps:
To be able to structure and identify the critical parts you should have a good understanding of the product and the project itself.
I recommend taking time to study the product, draft a solid smoke test, write down the common joints and specifications, and use them to not duplicate your work.
Having a good grip on the product makes it easier to target what has to be covered by tests and never break. Therefore, start building from the most relevant use cases.
For instance, in an e-commerce business retail, where the purpose of the website is to sell consumer goods or services, the main focus functionality is the checkout process.
The goal is to make sure that the process goes smoothly and it’s always possible to purchase. Because the checkout is a pretty complex test case itself, it requires many conditions to be fulfilled in order to be completed, so break it down into small test units.
Knowing what’s required from the business, draft small reusable test particles that are the preconditions to the actual end-to-end test.
“What are the steps to follow for the user to make a purchase?”
Preconditions:
What else to automate, ordered by relevance:
What’s left to integrate are edge cases, unexpected behaviors, specific validations…
When working on UI automation, you may encounter scenarios where managing browser tabs becomes essential, especially when trying to interact with specific elements on a page. For a detailed approach to handling such challenges, check out our guide on Mastering Tab Navigation with Katalon Studio, which offers insights based on a real-life scenario from our community.
Selecting the appropriate automated testing tool is essential for the QA person who is going to draft the project. There are enough automated testing tools on the market to get lost. A few names: Pingdom, Ghostinspector, Appium, Celery, Selenium, Cucumber, Espresso, Cypress, Mocha, Karma, Chai, Jasmine, Qunit, Percy… Learn more
From the most well-known Selenium to the newest trends, what matters is picking the automated testing tool that best suits your projects/teams overall requirements.
After months of researching various tools, evaluating the pros & cons overall, I found the right balance with Katalon Studio.
Katalon Studio is a fairly simple, straightforward automation testing tool that does not require advanced programming skills to write automated tests, while also offering a scripting mode for more advanced users and test case.
Here’s why and how it matched my requirement when I started.
With thanks to Katalon studio and our devops, it was possible to integrate my tests with our CI, (Jenkins), and run the tests on the server at will, or automated e.g. before or after any deployment.
Do you want to know more about Katalon Studio and how it works?
Read my article: “Let’s get technical!”
Author: Francesca Morando
Linkedin profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fmorando/