Scriptless Testing in a Mobile World

For years, organizations have aligned their mobile testing strategy around two methods.

1. Increasing headcount during development phases to dedicate to manual tests. 
2. Leveraging developers to create code-based test scripts.

The problem? Both of these methods involve a considerable amount of time and resources. Two things that they just don’t have.

If we’re shifting left to stay agile, increase deployments, and decrease time-to-value, we need to rethink the tools and frameworks we use.

The Ongoing No-Code Revolution

There’s a no-code and low-code revolution afoot. You can build beautiful websites simply by dragging and dropping, automate workflows with a few clicks of a mouse, and even manage endpoints without writing APIs. According to a 2021 survey, 58% of companies reported that they’re moving legacy systems to no-code and low-code solutions. From database to Excel and from the command line to the user interface, innovation around no- and low-code is helping more people do more things. It’s helping businesses deliver value much faster:

• According to Gartner, 70% of new applications developed by organizations will use low- or no-code technologies by 2025.
• 84% of businesses surveyed by Forrester are turning to low- and no-code to ease the strain on developer teams that are stretched thin.

Given the continuing strain on resources and the emphasis on faster innovation, we can only expect the demand for no-code to continue to grow.

While testing can be a bottleneck in the development lifecycle, it is also a fast path to innovation. And testing is often prioritized last on the business backlog.

Why?

Software testing is an integral part of every business function. It’s not as business-facing as CRM or as sleek as a productivity tool, yet improving the way we test can deliver much more value in way less time.

Consider that a growing percentage of development-related spending goes toward testing. With the device landscape rapidly expanding, mobile device testing is growing more challenging and expensive. This has to fundamentally change.

When it comes to testing with scriptless mobile test automation, the no-code revolution is here. And it helps organizations reduce their QA time from weeks to days and from days to hours.

Scriptless testing uses a no-code engine that abstracts the test creator from the underlying script. It works through recording and playback tools. Interactions on devices are recorded while running through the use case. Each interaction with the application’s elements is recorded and logged as part of the test case. The tester can also provide assertions by specifying expected results.

Going scriptless with mobile testing provides many benefits:

• Abstraction: Create simple to complex mobile test cases with simple clicks, all without worrying about writing, maintaining, or scaling code.
• Empower citizen developers: Test automation is no longer restricted to developers. A greater pool of resources can support testing efforts. Often, these are users who are closer to the end-user and have a deeper understanding of the business processes.
• Hands-off integration: Many scriptless automation tools have built-in integration with popular CI/CD platforms. Test cases run automatically when deploying a change.
• Reusability and composability: Scriptless automation makes it easier to reuse test cases, create templates, and compose new tests.
• Faster iteration: Changes are easier to make without having to adjust a code-based script. Many tools have in-app collaboration capabilities that allow close coordination with other team members.

And a few downsides:

• A little less flexibility: Code will continue to offer more granular control of actions, sacrificing some flexibility for convenience.
• More cooks in the kitchen: The more people writing test cases, the more opportunity there is for redundancy.
• Version tracking challenges: The advantage of open-sourced, code-based tests is that they can be easily packaged, versioned, and deployed. A seasoned development team can be very effective with proper change control.

Mobile app developers are challenged by the growing device landscape – fragmentation being one of the most troublesome parts of development and testing.

Testing on multiple devices has traditionally been handled through the use of real device labs or emulators. Both approaches present inherent challenges and benefits. Emulators are flexible and can save the cost of acquiring a real device, but can only attempt to imitate a device’s performance. Traditionally, a real device lab is expensive and requires a dedicated place to store hardware.

A better way is to let organizations borrow devices already hosted on the cloud. The real device cloud provides the best of both worlds: The flexibility and cost savings of an emulator and the accuracy of testing on an actual device.

Modern mobile testing tools allow testers to acquire a real device of their choice, record a manual test case, and run it across multiple devices simultaneously—and from anywhere. Each time a device is acquired, a dedicated instance with the application already installed is provisioned.

So, what does the current landscape look like? Here are some popular testing tools and frameworks leveraging no- and low-code:

• AccelQ is an AI-powered automation testing tool that supports web, desktop, cloud, and mobile applications. It uses AI and machine learning to generate test scenarios.
• Selenium IDE is an open-source testing framework that records browser-based test cases and lets developers convert them into automated tests. Developers can export and customize tests using different programming languages.
• Ranorex is a testing tool that uses a recorder to capture testing actions on mobile and web applications. It can also integrate with Selenium WebDriver to address certain shortcomings.
• Sofy is a 100% no-code mobile testing platform that empowers users to record mobile test cases on a real iOS or Android device accessed via the cloud. Sofy uses machine learning to identify the intent behind test cases so that when application code changes, the tests don’t break.

It's easy to see that there isn’t a corner of technology that the no-code movement won’t influence. Organizations that fail to control the growing cost of testing will fall behind. Scriptless test automation can address many of the pain points that come with scaling development. Most organizations—whether small, medium, or large—can benefit from moving test automation to a no-code solution. On top of that, innovations in AI and machine learning continue to create more powerful and efficient end-to-end test automation solutions, and it's wise to expect that we'll only see more of this in the near future.