Automation for UI testing is important. The primary goal of any business is to increase sales and growth. In the world of software development, UX/UI Design plays an essential role in achieving this goal. It’s no secret that an application’s UX/UI Design improves user experience and customer satisfaction, in turn expanding the number of users of a specific application. (And we all know what it’s like to encounter a poorly designed app!)
However, this isn’t an easy task to achieve. UI testing is very much a manual and a time-consuming process today. Worse yet, the pace of a typical app’s release cycle may not allow for exhaustive manual testing, particularly because of the dynamic nature of changes to the UX/UI with every release.
In this blog entry, I’ll take a closer look at a few important aspects of why it’s so beneficial to automate UI testing.
Benefits of automation for UI testing
So, what are the benefits of automated UI testing? Automated testing uses tools, scripts/code to execute tests without requiring humans to execute repetitive test cases (read more from Sofy about this here). By way of automated testing, executing test scripts and generating test results are all performed automatically. This results in benefits in the following areas:
- Load testing: This demonstrates whether the software (or the app) can handle the number of transactions it is expected to receive and verify the behavior of the application under both a normal and a peak load.
- Regression testing: This is repeated testing performed to determine if any defects are left uncovered or have newly developed as a result of changes in the software (or due to some unrelated components). The frequency of these tests makes them most suitable for automated testing.
- Performance testing: Required to analyze the speed, stability, and scalability of the system or application. This type of testing is concerned with achieving response times, throughput, and resource-utilization levels that meet the performance objectives for the project or product.
Automated UI testing challenges
Some software testers feel that executing UI testing manually is more rapid and effortless compared to automated testing. This is because the core challenges that come with automated UI testing can be very complex. For example:
- Complex web functionalities: Several web components are included in our web applications that become entrenched with other products and frames. These include intricate maps, diagrams, and flowcharts, and associated testing can be complicated.
- Constant UI change: Modern innovations require development teams to constantly modify their applications. These new functionalities result in constant interface changes. This can be difficult to test for in the same fashion as before.
- Presence of too many tools: There is a variety of testing tools available with many focusing solely on the user interface. However, these tools may not be accurate or valid and due to budget constraints or project complications, a lot of companies end up picking the wrong set of tools.
- Calculating ROI: The user interface is constantly changing and evolving and hence the tests change accordingly making it harder to determine the return of your spend on user interface testing.
Why choose automated testing over manual testing?
There are no shortage of reasons why moving to automated testing is the smart choice. For example, choosing automation of manual testing allows you and your team to:
- Swiftly handle repetitive and time-consuming tasks
- Perform parallel testing
- Complete non-functional testing like load, performance, and stress testing
- Avoid inevitable human errors
Automated testing helps you and your team maximize efficiency while eliminating monotony. It delivers data-driven testing while allowing you to test software on different platforms with different configurations, and helps ensure continuous system stability and functionality by storing historical data for your records. This ensures shorter development cycles and better software quality in general.
Catching bugs early on is another important facet of automation testing. And by shifting left as early as possible, you ensure that testing occurs whenever possible. This negates the possibility of encountering a landmine in your software on the big day (and, take it from me, this happens far too often!).
Reducing project costs also helps in increasing test coverage by shrinking the number of team members you need to test. That’s another huge benefit that ensures your team members focus on high-value strategy and building automation scripts rather than repetitive testing. It provides teams and employees the chance to focus on the newer, higher-order level tasks rather than executing monotonous and repeated actions.
Getting the most from automation for UI testing
Software testing is an integral part of rolling out any application and UI testing is as crucial as it is complex. However, these processes present no shortage of challenges. These can lead to layers of complications. In turn, it’s important to choose the right testing approach while keeping in mind your project scope, environment, budget, and so on. Whatever your decision, automated testing is definitely poised to erase many of the challenges that face UI testing today.
It’s no secret that to achieve automation success with a mobile app, you must build with the right scripts and with an eye for the nature of the system. We’ve built Sofy with exactly this in mind: Sofy’s testing framework helps boost your engineering capabilities, allow you to perform efficient testing with automation, thus enhancing developer productivity, and the ability to ship quality code fast.
