Scriptless Test Automation for Web Applications Using Testsigma

As per Gartner's definition, scriptless testing tools reduce or eliminate the amount of scripting involved in the creation of tests using model-, object-, data-, or keyword-driven approaches.

Why the Scriptless Test Automation Approach?

The scriptless test case creation approach can speed up the process of test automation and maximize the reusability of code with reduced maintenance.

The biggest challenges in automation testing are the initial time spent on test script development. As development teams do, it is wise to adopt a script-less framework for automation that makes test automation appear less complex.

Scriptless automation allows stakeholders to participate in quality improvement and requires less/no technical expertise.

This approach towards automation reduces time and effort required to automate and ensure higher levels of maintainability and ease of updating changing requirements.

Automation testing tools have evolved in recent times to fit into the Agile/DevOps process to release quality software faster. More details can be found here.

Selecting the Right Scriptless Automation Testing Tool

Record and playback tools are among the first picks in adopting scriptless automation. It may seem easy and compelling at first, but the system-generated scripts are hard to understand and difficult to maintain. Also, they demand a lot of rework.

The main challenges with legacy test automation methods are building a robust and maintainable automation framework and managing the objects and identifiers.

Automated tests need to be reusable and maintainable and should not be resistant to changes in the application UI and should ensure that the automated tests do not break.

A lot of the times, test scripts are developed only once the application is built and stabilized. Due to this, a lack of early feedback becomes a downside affecting the cost of quality.

Testsigma’s Approach

Testsigma allows manual testers to take charge of test automation using a user-friendly scriptless approach. The test scripts are developed using simple natural language processing (NLP) and don't require coding knowledge.

It provides a unified automation testing mechanism that suits every complex testing requirement and allows for the collaboration of cross-functional teams, which will ease out the existing complexity to actively participate in test automation.

Testsigma empowers your functional manual testers, business users, and subject matter experts with test automation without learning to code.

Testsigma has an extensible set of features (Custom Functions, REST APIs) to automate even the most complex scenarios.

Use Case

We will take a simple scenario of account login for OrangeHRM as an example and see how we automate this using Testsigma. If you are not familiar with OrangeHRM, it is an HR and Leaves Management Application.

There are four simple steps in logging into the OrangeHRM page:

1. Go to the OrangeHRM Login page
2. Enter the Username
3. Enter the Password
4. Click on the Login button

Let us see how these steps can be automated using Testsigma.

We will create a test case first.

• Navigate to the test cases page by clicking on Test Development (third icon on left navigation menu) from Testsigma Dashboard Page.
• Now, create a Test Case by clicking on + Test Case button in the Test Cases page.
• Enter a name and click on Create button to create the Test Case.

Now, we can add the first Test Step to go to the OrangeHRM Login page.

1. Enter the URL of the application (https://opensource-demo.orangehrmlive.com) in the ‘Enter your Application URL’ field and click on the Start button to create the first step as shown below:

That was easy!

Note: If you were using Selenium, you should have written at least 10 or 15 lines of boilerplate code before actually writing this first step.

Let us move onto the second Test Step, i.e enter the username.

2. Click on the Add Next Test Step button, which opens up the new Test Step creation wizard with the Action Text field.

Type ‘enter’ or ‘type’ in the Action Text field to get suggestions for the Test Step as shown below:

Testsigma has a set of Natural Language statements that you can use to create a step. Since we are going to create a Test Step that enters a username into a username field, we will select it by clicking the suggested Statement and Enter test data in the UI identifier field.

Now, double click on the test data part and replace it will your actual username (Admin).
Double click on the UI identifier part and replace it will a UI identifier name (username). We will assign the value or the UI identifier later. Click on the Create button to create the Step.

Thus, the second step also has been created without using a single block of code. Manual Testers would feel just at home!

Similarly, we can create the remaining steps.

Here’s the final list of Test Steps:

Please check the below article for a detailed walkthrough — Web Application Testing using Testsigma

Conclusion

In the above article, we saw how we can use Testsigma's Unified Scriptless Platform to create automated test cases for a web application without writing a single line of code.

We can do the same for mobile web and native mobile applications (both iOS and Android). If you would like to know more, check out Testsigma.

Welcome to the era of #SmartTestAutomation.

Happy automating!