An overview of Scriptless Test Automation.

With time, the complexity and maturity of applications have increased and so have the approaches of testing and test automation. There are many testing tools available in the market now a days, which claim to be simple, easy to maintain and have extensive features. However, for better test coverage, testers are always required to leverage coding and scripting. More codes imply more maintenance costs for scripts and frameworks. Thus, efforts were put on developing processes with little coding involved and still achieve quality and maintainability. This paved the way for Scriptless or Codeless Test Automation.

Most of the functional test automation is used in regression testing. Here the effects of change can be seen only when the developers have delivered the code. It gives the automation tester very less time to adapt to the changes made. This makes it very important for the testing teams to be ready for such situations. To cater to these challenges, many automation frameworks with sophisticated code development and modularization came into being. They are Keyword Driven Framework, Modular Framework, Hybrid Framework, etc. Each automation framework resolved issues as per project priority. But most of the time, the maintenance efforts exceeded the development efforts due to debugging complexities.

With the introduction of the Agile development methodology, test automation became more challenging. Here more and more time was being spent over test automation development, maintenance, creation of tests and updating them as per scope changes finally executing them.

With increasing competition, organizations focus more on the cost benefits and improve cost efficiency. This finally evolved into the development of a script-less test automation in order to simplify the development and maintenance of test automation. The most aggressive, encouraging factors for script-less automation can be listed as follows:

• Delivery Speed
• Overall maintenance
• Configurability
• Robustness
• Efficiency

The benefits of scriptless test automation are numerous.

• Test Automation becomes easier and comprehensive.
• Its pre-defined set of methods reduces the time required for automating test cases.
• There is no code level debugging. Hence, maintenance becomes easier and less time consuming.
• As no programming language is required, it is easy to train non-technical engineers and business analysts, which enable them to contribute towards

test automation.

• As lesser to no time is required in scripting, testers are able to focus more on analyzing results, detecting inconsistencies and focusing on functional aspects.
• Automated and Manual tests, both are located at the same place which gives a transparent view of what has been automated and what has not been automated.
• Increases the productivity of the test process.

conclusion

Scriptless Test Automation is an idea to resolve most of the limitations and challenges of test automation. It does not confirm the obsolescence of code based test automation. However, with the increasing complexity of software technology and their features, scriptlessness is set to be the future attribute of test automation frameworks.

Michael works for Cigniti Technologies, which is the world's first Independent Software Testing Company to be appraised at CMMI-SVC Level 5, and an ISO 9001:2008 & ISO 27001:2013 certified organization.