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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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)
3 Antworten auf „On codeless test automation tool“
Nice points, and relevant to me. Currently trying to move into a less „threatening“ or scary automation Framework and trying Katalon Studio. As you so though, some of the tests still require coding underneath to modify the tests – especially if you want to randomise something or you need to do something external to the UI. Post is short but sweet 😉
Hi Chriss, many thanks for this quick post. I really like it, please keep writing to inspire the successors.
A few comments from my side:
1-What do you mean by „extreme“ in …“complicated stuff away, to an extreme that also non technical people“…. Is it „to an extent“ maybe?
2-2 and 3 sound like they are not seperate but connected things (unless I am missing smth :))
3-No/low code tools are marketed also to coders. They are like saying „you don’t have to have any more headaches trying to code, try this instead“ 🙂
Best
Serkan
Hey Serkan,
thanks for commenting.
@1: Yes, that’s totally what I meant.
@2; Yes, they’re related. It’s the same cause, but with different consequences.
@3: Again: yes. They are also marketed to coders. Which is fine. As Bas explains in way more detail in the post I linked, it is totally okay to use abstractions. But you should know about what’s behind, and you should also be aware of the limitations of abstracting things away.