Kategorien
Allgemein

On codeless test automation tool

Disclaimer: This is a quick brain dump, in order to have this thoughts stored somewhere to not having to retype this everytime I’m involved in a discussion about the topic. I might develop this into a full blog post one day.
Nevertheless, happy to hear your opinions on the topic.

These promises of codeless record & playback tools are around for 20+ years.
Imho, there two (or three) possibilities:

  1. You code the stuff yourself, using a real programming language + frameworks/ tools. Imho the most powerful option, but of course also the most to learn/ master. This basically is programming.
  2. You abstract all the complicated stuff away, to an extreme that also non technical people understand it, but you loose most of the power and possibilities of 1.
  3. You hide the complicated stuff behind a fancy UI, that looks shiny and easy to use in their demos, but if you want to do something that goes beyond the happy path, you still need to know & understand programming concepts. So although these tools are marketed at non-coders, the target group cannot reach the full potential of the tools.

Just my 2 cents.

Update 2021-10-05: Bas Dijkstra has written a blog post on the same topic, which is totally expressing my thoughts and believes on the topic, so I can fully recommend it to my dear readers: On codeless automation (or rather on abstraction layers)