Follow @techarcis

Script-less automation, this term is most popular nowadays in the world of test Automation. The companies who have such script-less automation tools / frameworks promote that it allows the business users to comfortably automate the business scenarios without having much knowledge on the tools and their underlying languages. So, is this approach really script less? Does the importance of technical automation testers have come down? Is there no demand for more experts in the test automation tools or the underlying programming languages? Not really.

Enabling you to get it right the first time: 7 Useful tips to get started with Automation Testing

Let’s understand what is this scriptless automation all about and how is it helpful in present scenario of test automation. Script-less automation is an abstraction layer over and above the Application Under Testing (AUT) and the automation testing tool, which consists of the hundreds of functionalities perform various actions on the AUT to test the applications. These functions may be common technical functions like “Open”, “Close”, “Save”, “Minimize”, “Maximize” or other common arithmetic functions which we perform. These can also be specific to the AUT, to test the functionalities on the applications – like creating a user, modifying a user, adding roles, opening an account, editing the details, closing the account etc. Though these script-less tools have several inbuilt functions/actions mainly keyword driven, but still we need the Test Automation experts to create new functions/actions or modify existing ones coupled along with the abstraction layer. Basically script-less frameworks/tools screens over and above all of these which may help the end-user or business user to automate the test cases.

It is the advanced level of Keyword driven automation approach where the test automation developers create functions for each of the identified key-words in the AUT. These key-words are created beneath the framework which is not visible for the business users who is testing the system. The automation developers has to visualize and create these multiple functions for various technical and functional areas which should be flexible and invisible to the end users but at the same time should allow them to test the system/application in all dimensions.

The major advantage of these frameworks is that the business users who are having good knowledge on the end product/application can test the system/product/application without knowing any programming or scripting languages.It does not truly mean that anyone without the any technical knowledge can test the system and create automation scripts.

Another advantage of these frameworks is that Test Automation experts can create these functions with a common code which can be recognized by multiple tools that supports automation. The advantage of this is that these frameworks can be implemented, irrespective of the tools (GUI – Open /Commercial, API/ web services tools) which the users use for test automation.

As long as these frameworks can work with the major software test automation tools, the adoption for these frameworks will increase.

 

More Related Blog