Most organizations today have divided testing into parts: Manual testing and Automation testing. Manual testers test software while automators diligently automate their testing work. Automators are paid more and manual testers are paid less (usually).

Therefore, instinctively manual testers learn scripting to foray into automation and thus enjoy a higher pay. Testers rather than actually doing what they are best at (exploration i.e. testing) focus toward acquiring a different skill set. Too much money, time and effort are invested in something which now-a-days can be achieved in just few mouse clicks.

I have used Microsoft’s product - Visual Studio. In the past, developers hand coded to develop UI which was time consuming, error prone and required skilled coders. Today, Visual Studio allows developers; by using different wizards; to visually design the GUI in the studio. This worked with them successfully and Microsoft was able to achieve a quantum jump in its sales while companies enjoyed never seen before productivity. So let me ask, why can’t test automators do the same thing for automation testing? Or better why can’t manual testers automate without having to learn how to code?  

Welcome to the script-less world of testing. Instead of a code editor, automation engineers or manual testers will work in a graphical environment to compose automated tests by selecting objects and actions from dropdown menus. They can also visually create conditions, iterations, etc. Test Automation tool will only work as driving agent for automated test suites.

Script less test automation can provide an easy to use interface – instead of learning a scripting language, or even a programming language, manual tester get to work on a drop‐down and spreadsheet like user interface. This helps creating automate scripts faster (some companies could shorten up to 40% time to automate). One of nice benefit an organization can get from such automation process is that they can save time and wages spent on building scripting skills of their employees.

A quote from wiki says,” Instead builds a model of the Application Under Test (AUT) and then enables the tester to create test cases by simply editing in test parameters and conditions. This requires no scripting skills, but has all the power and flexibility of scripted approach .Test-case maintenance seems to be easy, as there is no code to maintain and as the AUT changes the software objects can simply be re-learned or added. It can be applied to any GUI-based software application.”

Point to be noted: The reason why most automation projects fail is that there are many traps in automation. Whether it is scripted or script-less test automation, organizations need to know a lot more about tools before directly jumping into automation. In my next article I will update you with some good scriptless tools working on same concept. Stay tuned, happy testing and keep reading Testing Circus!