How To Start Automated Testing Without Coding
Automated Testing For Dummies: Secure the journeys most important to conversions without having to code with this easy-to use End to End Automation Tool.
Testing is a necessary step in the development of your product. Sure, it’s frustrating to spend hours testing in the hopes of exposing tiny hidden bugs in the system — but it is even more frustrating to lose customers because of them.
As we strive to become more Agile, Test Automation becomes essential. We all want to deliver our next iterations faster without sacrificing quality. What this means is we want continuous iterations, and continuous delivery. By automating your tests, you can continuously ensure the quality of your software, and save time and money that would otherwise be spent on fixing issues, resolving tickets and hiring QAs.
But getting started with an Automated Testing strategy can look like an Everest to climb, especially when you do not know how to code.
Where to start?
There are different levels to testing. You can test out individual Units, which is the job of developers; and you can test APIs to see if they meet expectations. UI testing is more complicated since it requires long strings of code to be effective, but it is also the most important to the end-user. Also called End-to-End testing, it makes sure that everything will work for the customer.
To be able to cover all three efficiently can take a lot of years of expertise and an incredible force of organisation. In other words, it is not a given for everybody. UI testing is a good place to start with Automation for a couple of reasons:
- It is the easiest to implement with a tool like Asayer;
- It is what matters the most to the customer and to conversions;
- It is the hardest to code manually;
For the end user experience, the UI is everything; it is the website as it appears to the customer and it is what the health of your business depends on. Is everything working as it should? Can the user find the products they are looking for? Can they check-out?
To make sure that your user journeys work and that they have all the necessary conditions to transform (or convert), you need to do some end-to end-testing.
Convert critical user journeys into automated tests.
Asayer is a DevOps tool for web applications that records and logs everything users do on your website. Using session replay, you can see how people use your website and you can research through the sessions to uncover issues.
From there you can quickly create automated tests to secure your the user journeys most important to conversions. To do that there are two ways; either you can directly convert user journeys into an automated test, or you can use the test recorder.
1. Research through the sessions
When you start recording your users, their sessions appear listed on your Asayer page. From there you can research through the session and replay the one of your choices. This way you can immediately identify the business critical user journeys — those that your users take the most often and; you can identify the journeys that are prone to errors.
Below, we’ve selected a session where someone books an appointment. It is an important pathway because the business depends on these reservations.
On the right-hand side you have labels describing in easy-to-understand terms the steps that this user took. To create an automated test, all you need to do is select the scenarios you want to include in your test suite, and click on Automate. In this example, we’ve selected the following steps:
Step. 1: Visit the URL;
Step 2: Click on Book an appointment online;
Step 3: Click on Next Available appointment in June.
After you’ve selected the steps you want and converted them, you get an automated test that looks like this:
From here, you can drag and drop the steps to change their orders, you can add elements easily from the quick-tools menu and, if you know how to code, you can add custom steps to make a more detailed test.
2. Test Recorder
This is the easiest way you can create an automated test. No need to write lines of code, no need to spend hours trying to find the right combination of steps. This method combines the ease of manual testing with the overcharged efficiency of test automation.
How does it work? Download the Asayer — Test Recorder extension. With this, all you need to do is to take the place of the end user and navigate through your flow on your browser with the recorder on.
The extension will save the scenarios you are doing them on the widget directly into an test steps.
It could not be made simpler.
For example: Say you want to automate a test that would secure your checkout journey. After turning the recording on, you would perform each step as a customer would, clicking on each element. From there, each step you take is recorded and converted into a test case suit.
Run!
All that is left for you to do is to click ‘Run’ and we will execute the test on our cloud based infrastructure. That way, you do not have to worry about complicated provisioning machines or having to build up your internal architecture. You can choose the browser and the environment you want to test (for example staging or production) and at the end of the operation you will receive a detailed report.
- The timeline of the test (how long each step took to respond); clearly detailed so you do not have to dig through complicated technical logs to understand why your test failed.
- Detailed Selenium logs of the run so your developers can look at it in more detail
- The browser console, where it logs everything during the run
- Video recording of the test being performed
- The source code of the test so you can export it
With all these elements you know if there is an issue, where the issue is, and under which context it occurred. And with the click of a button you can transmit that information to your debugging team.
With a tool like Asayer, Automation has never been easier. There are no more excuses to avoid getting started and bringing your software to the next level!
