Choosing the Right UI Automation Test

In recent years, a popular word - UI , and UI seem to be so tall, and the software testing industry is no exception, such as UI automation testing.

What are the common UI automation testing programs?

• Unit Test with UI , such as mocking out the underlying code, only testing UI logic;
• API Test with UI , such as UI component , most APIs are related to UI ;
• function test. Most UI automation tests are functional tests. Or Regression Test , that is, regression testing;

UI automation testing has both advantages and disadvantages. The advantages are: wide coverage, no need for the source code of the program under test, maximum simulation of user operations , etc. The disadvantage is that there are also some fixed factors , such as: most of the UI automation tests are written The people who do not have rich coding experience, and the automated test code is also software code, so it is still necessary to follow all the processes from the development to the design, and even some UI automation tests are done by recording and playing back scripts.

So is suitable for UI automation testing, and are there other alternatives? So there are a few points to consider before adopting a UI automation solution:

• Need to see the level of support for the product;
• Whether the development language of the automation tool needs to be learned, and whether the third-party class library of the automation tool is rich, it is recommended to choose an automation tool that uses a general language, such as python or c# as a scripting language tool. You can refer to the UI automation testing tool TestWriter on the market recently , which uses C# and java as scripting language tools. Since the operation is simple, there is no need for script maintenance, so the maintainability is easier to maintain compared to tools of the same type, and there are many automated testing frameworks selenium, etc.;
• Does the automation tool provide a convenient way to generate UI mappings when defining UI nodes. And whether this mapping is easier to maintain;
• Whether it is convenient to debug test programs, such as whether to support breakpoints and variable value viewing.

One more thing, UI automation is an inescapable ability of testing, you can not rely on it, but you need it.