Most of the industry's codeless automation solutions focus on record and playback or drag and drop, which prove to be flakey, difficult to scale, and largely ineffective in the evolving QA industry. That's why most companies still choose to hire automation engineers. Our codeless automation framework allows testers with no coding experience to automate test cases almost exactly the way automation engineers create these test cases. We removed the code barrier to test automation and added a collection of features to make automating even easier. With our application, manual testers with no coding experience can automate efficiently and effectively, with the ability to scale.
In our experience, we've seen QA Engineers with no automation experience start to automate their company websites within 2 hours of being introduced to our technology, however, we understand that 2 hours is not the norm. Most users start automating within 6 hours.
The answer to this question highly depends on the level of interest and commitment of the individual.
Selenium and Appium are automation frameworks used to automate through a user interface by executing a predefined set of user actions. They mimic a user by interacting with a UI the same way a person would. A test automation engineer writes code to tell Selenium and Appium what actions to execute and the framework executes those actions. The difference is that Selenium is used to automate websites and web applications where as Appium is used to automate Android, iOS, and Windows applications. Our codeless automation framework leverages the Selenium and Appium libraries so users write test cases that manipulate user interfaces.
Web pages are made up of web elements. Essentially everything you see on a web page is a web element. Locators are ways to identify elements on a web page. While there are many locator strategies out there, we focus on three main locators: id, xpath, and css selector.
In test automation, id's are the best locator to use. If an element has an id, use it. If not, xpath and css selector are effective ways to query elements. Getting familiar with how xpath and css selector work can be tremendously helpful in creating long lasting locators, however, understanding how they work is not a requirement to use them. It's easy to copy and paste these values in Google Chrome for web automation and to use applications like UiAutomator and Appium Desktop to get id's and xpath's for app automation.
Because applications constantly change, locators always need to be updated and that's a huge problem in test automation today. That's what prompted us to create our locator regenerator.
Here's a good tutorial on different locator types for locating web elements.
https://www.edureka.co/blog/locators-in-selenium/
For those automating for the first time, we recommend using css selectors or xpaths. To get the css selector of a web element in Google Chrome:
Right click the web element
Click inspect
Right click the highlighted element
Hover over copy
Click copy selector
Start with the StreamLine Web Automator first. Make sure to read through all of the documentation we provided. Follow the format of the provided examples.
When you're ready to start automating:
set up a config file to run a test in a specific browser
enter the url of the page you want to test in the test file
locate elements you want to interact with and enter the proper information in the test file
execute tests with the keywords / actions dictionary on those web elements you located
Do not move on to app automation until you are comfortable with web automation.
Note: The first time you double click the run files, you’ll need to grant access to run
Double click the file you want to run
Mac - System Preferences >> Security and Privacy >> Open anyway
Windows - A popup will show up >> More info >> Run anyway
Then:/Users/tester/Desktop/StreamLineQA-Automation-master/Resources/Getting started.docx
Open terminal / command prompt
Run command chmod a+x <path_to_run_file>
Mac example - chmod a+x "/Users/Tester/Desktop/StreamLineQA-Automation-master/StreamLine Web Automator/execute_tests_mac.command"
Windows example - chmod a+x "C:\Users\Tester\Desktop\StreamLineQA-Automation-master\StreamLine Web Automator\execute_tests_windows.bat"
HTML attributes provide additional information for web elements. They are specified in the opening HTML tag and are usually in the format attribute="value".
For example:
<div id="button_one" name="button" href="https://www.streamlineqa.com"> Visit StreamLineQA <div>
In this example, the attributes are id, name, and href.
A valid keyword / action would be compare attribute name
Css values are styling properties of web pages and web elements. Some common css values you will encounter are color, font-size, font-family, text-align, and line-height.
An example keyword / action is compare css value font-size