Automated Web UI Testing: Best Practices, Challenges, & Tools

Automated web UI Testing enables developers and testers with quick and easy test creation and top level of testing reliability, freeing them up from time-intensive manual testing. Today we asked QA specialists from DogQ codeless testing platform to help us define its best practices, challenges, and top list of tools for performing web UI Testing.

Automated Testing Best Practices

Automated web testing of the user interface is performed with the help of specialized tools with minimum QA team resources. But this doesn’t mean that human involvement is not needed at all. In order to reach better results while performing web UI testing, you should follow a number of best practices recommended by professional QA specialists, which are enlisted below:

• Use realistic test data: Mock data should be as close to the real example as possible. Try to reproduce the real scenario from the business case. It will help you to check how the system will work in real life and catch as many issues as possible.
• Define and follow a naming convention: All your tests should be written in the same way and use the same structure. It will help you easily find the required test case or scenario, and make sure that no tests are missing, and all features are tested.
• Keep your tests independent: You need to be able to run any test separately, with no need in running other tests for that. Thus, if you create a testing scenario, it shouldn’t include cases that can’t be run without the results of other test cases.
• Keep your tests simple: Every test should be responsible for no more than one feature. It’s better to have 10 cases, covering a small part of the application, than one huge test, which covers everything. If one of the small tests will fail, it will show you, what exact part of the application is broken.
• Use the “Behavior Driven Development” approach – Think of real app user behavior and try to simulate it in your test cases, rather than create tons of tests for the sake of testing. It helps you to avoid useless tests and to cover really important parts of the application.
• Use a headless browser for UI testing – In general, tests run faster in a headless browser. It happens because a headless browser allows you to run several tests at once, and it is not using CPU resources for data displaying. Also, it can be easily run via CI/CD tools or in a cloud.
• Move tests into the cloud and trigger their execution via CI hooks – The best time to test your application for stability is when the source code changes. CI hooks can indicate when it happens and run test execution. You will receive a notification from the CI system if the test will fail.

Challenges to Pay Attention

Web automation testing tools require regular maintenance, but at the same time, they should be ready for correct execution 24/7. At this point we come to the core challenge of automated testing: tests should be run on a solid system, which is able to scale on demand, offer powerful computing resources, and stay highly secure. But this is not the only challenge you should be ready for, here is the list: 

• Business-specific: the person who is writing tests should have the deep business knowledge and a good understanding of a user’s point of view.
• Testing during intense development: during agile development, requirements may change extremely fast, and tests must follow all the changes.
• Tests maintenance: modern apps have a complex interface with dynamic elements, so when the page is reloading several times during the test, the selectors of its elements may change and break the test.

A good solution to solve all these challenges is to use a user-friendly and intuitive codeless test automation tool like DogQ. On the one hand, even non-technical specialists with deep business knowledge can easily work with it, and on the other hand, it provides macro uses for working with page elements, so you can create repositories with elements’ accessors and adjust to frequent changes in apps’ elements. 

Top List of Tools We Recommend

Every year at least a dozen of web UI test automation tools enter the market, and each of them has its own focus and peculiarities, so it can be hard to know where to start. Here is the list of tools that we recommend paying attention to:

• DogQ

DogQ is a no-code test automation tool suitable for QA and programming engineers, non-technical specialists, freelancers, and small startups, Its functionality is enough to cover all sorts of functional, UI, and regression testing without coding, as well as reuse the results gained, and share them with the team. It also has a computer vision AI-powered technology allowing it to recognize and accurately test all the text elements on web pages.

• Katalon

Katalon is the tool in the middle between code and codeless automated testing platforms,  more suitable for QA engineers than for non-technical specialists. It offers wide functionality as a free tool. The main feature is the widget for Google Chrome, which track your behavior on the page and convert it into test cases. You can edit the result in Katalon IDE as the page object model or export it as a test script to another tool.

• mabl

This codeless testing tool is able to integrate with your CI/CD workflow and makes it easy to manage your tests. It significantly increases test coverage and development speed with self-healing, powerful visualization, and a wide range of automation scripts. Plus, the learning curve is also small here.

• Perfecto

This tool is useful for specialists looking for an all-in-one solution for web UI testing. It ensures stable testing execution despite any app changes, such as new iOS or Android version updates, new browser or smartphone releases, etc. It also provides its users with multiple locators for recorded web elements and self-healing functions.

• Ranorex

Ranorex is a trusted tool for automated web UI testing. The key feature is the ability to use object recognition during the test case execution and then record and playback actions, converting them into natural languages. Plus, it has a flexible test automation interface that launches all executed .EXE files from the command line.

Wrapping Up

Web automated testing is capturing the market of QA professional tools. Each year, software product companies provide their solutions with more sophisticated algorithms, better designs, and more useful features that increase testers’ productivity, minimize daily routine tasks, and raise employee retention rates. Understanding your current testing landscape, and challenges, and consulting with a reliable testing software company will help you select an automated testing platform that perfectly meets your company’s unique requirements.

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