Most often, product features are required to be deployed to production frequently, rapidly, reliably, and without any downtime. In the DevOps approach, the time span between code commit and deployment to production is quite short, maybe within an hour. This makes test automation quite challenging. The existence of a framework may not suffice to meet the rapid pace at which software is developed and released. This article talks of a solution to this problem; an approach to building a test automation layer that helps automate test cases by using reusable, ready-to-use functions/keywords. An approach popularly known as Scriptless Test Automation overcomes the issues mentioned above and benefits organizations at the earliest stage.
To know more in detail about scriptless test automation we should first understand the limitations of script-based test automation.
A simple definition for scriptless test automation would be “an approach to automate manual test cases without creating new scripts in any tool-specific language”. The key highlight of this approach is that it can be used by non-technical users also.
It uses already developed scripts – “Keywords” to build up test cases for the automation run. These keywords will be the most commonly used actions like – “Enter Text”, “Click Element”, “Select Option” etc, and can be easily used to build up a suite of test cases.
Point to note: Scriptless does not mean script-free.
The scriptless approach creates a wrapper that hides the tools and technologies used. Testers do not need to bother about the languages compatible with the tools used for automation.
There is a myth: A good framework that contains reusable functions is the same as scriptless testing. However, the scriptless approach is a superior form of a framework that creates a wrapper that hides all complexities of script-based automation.
Scriptless test automation needs to be designed by an expert who utilizes experience/expertise to create an optimized set of keywords. Most commonly used arithmetic calculations like finding the average, calculating interest, file operations like reading/writing from/to excel/CSV/plain text, etc, database operations like establishing connections to different DBS, fetching data, etc are converted to keywords and kept ready before the application is ready. This will reduce the automation time and enhance ROI right from the initial stages of implementing test automation.
The time taken to fix changes in UI would be lower than in the traditional approach, as all the assets used for automation would be stored in a repository. A change made at the repository will reflect in all instances that utilize the asset.
In a scriptless approach, stakeholders can be involved in the initial stage itself and provide appropriate feedback to ensure the test focus is correct
