Businesses today are pressured with constant improvement to stay in the competition as new products emerge. As predicted in many reports for 2020, the gap between testers and developers is being narrowed. Plus, Agile and DevOps are receiving greater attention, along with minimal human intervention to save time for business strategies. As a result, codeless test automation has been put into the spotlight as the promising benchmark every developer must apply. 
Why Codeless Test Automation for Automated Testing?
The Adoption of Automated Testing
Manual testing requires a human to apply and test out different scenarios and inputs so as to find defects in the product. This step-by-step task leaves little space for exploratory testing and reporting, especially when agile processes continue to gain traction.
Meanwhile, automated testing came into play to simplify the testing process with predefined actions, comparable results, and intelligent reports. Thus it drives more values for both the organization and testers.
The Testing Bottlenecks
The transition from manual to automated testing in 2020 has pushed companies to constantly seeking tools and strategies to successfully apply automation. The rise in attention for test automation led to the constant growth of test automation tools, for instance, Selenium, Katalon Studio, Appium, and many more.
To take full advantage of these automation tools, the QA teams must have sufficient programming skills. Besides, businesses are becoming more agile, products are getting updated more frequently, and that has put testing in a much higher priority for business leaders.
Plus, recruiting testers and QA professionals with extensive programming skills is still a challenge to fully leverage test automation tools.
The Advantages of Codeless Test Automation
#1) Short Learning Curve: With codeless testing, QA engineers mostly depend on UI elements and user-like behaviors to design their test cases. This would take away the burden of coding and deal with complex automation frameworks.
#2) Reduce Mundane and Repetitive Tasks: As the team devotes less time and effort on writing test scripts, they can focus more on product functionality and user experience rather than dwelling into test case creation.
#3) Less Unnecessary Scripting: As codeless testing uses native identification of the objects, QA engineers can forget about reading or writing codes. Hence, they can begin GUI testing with UI and visual factors immediately once the developers have finished UI development.
#4) Cost-effective: Codeless testing eliminates the developer dependency parts. With codeless testing, QA engineers can start performing testing themselves, and developers won’t get involved in creating UI tests. This frees up time and bandwidth for the developers to focus on other important responsibilities.
What a Promising Codeless Testing Tool in 2020 Needs
Require Less Programming Skills
2020 is the year for the emergence of Codeless Testing. Many record and playback tools in the market have started to show limitations. Thus, the product teams prefer a more efficient solution to test their product, i.e., Codeless Test Automation.
It shifts tester focus towards their crafts rather than mastering coding skills required for most automation frameworks.
Codeless testing tools require less programming skills yet still meet the demand for Coverage, Scalability, and Maintenance capabilities in test results. Clearly, testers are not programmers, and Automation engineers who are capable of the job are scarce. This has made codeless test automation the ultimate choice for product teams.
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Applications
The two hot terms of 2019: Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning continue to be the main focus of businesses and QA teams in 2020. They have been proven to add significant benefits and make things easier as they grow over time.
To be specific, AI applications support the team with Test case maintenance, Risk assessment, Issue detection, and Prioritization. Moreover, AI deals with the piling up of log files as well as revealing the issue origin and how to deal with them.
Automated And Shareable Reports with Analytics
The combination of codeless test automation and AI/ML results in “Smart” testing — the next criteria a comprehensive tool needs.
Teams need support to deal with hefty chunks of log history and data to gain valuable insights. AI-assisted dashboards and analytics help teams to oversee the entire product quality and performance. Some automation solutions also enable Monitoring test cases, Execution time, along with sharing results across team members.
This means QA, Development, and Product department will have a unified, updated, comprehensive information on the status of each test execution.
Katalon — The Codeless Automation Testing Solution of 2020
Katalon Studio is among the few platforms that are capable of supporting Codeless Test Automation. Users with or without programming skills can leverage Katalon Studio to Create tests, Manage projects, View results in smart dashboards. Plus, team collaboration is enhanced with a myriad of CI/CD tool integrations.
The Katalon Solution offers four products:
- Katalon Studio: Build test scripts and execute test cases for Web, API, Mobile, and Desktop applications for free.
- Katalon Studio Enterprise: A paid, advanced license of Katalon Studio for large teams and scalable projects.
- Katalon Runtime Engine: An add-on to execute test cases in command-line interface and console mode.
- Katalon TestOps: Export test results and View from dashboards, with the assistance of smart analytics.
Katalon Studio Key Features for Codeless Test Automation
- Powerful Record and Playback: Test recording is the easiest way for fresh testers to start test automation. Knowing that identifying objects on applications is time-consuming, Katalon Web Recorder Utility captures and converts them into runnable codes in the back-end.
- Smart XPath: When an application changes, one of the things that are too hard to fix is the element location. Katalon Smart XPath uses AI to automatically locate the web or app elements to help you cope with constant changes in every new release.
- Smart Wait: A brand-new feature in Katalon Studio 7 handles the Wait issues in Selenium. Basically, it will automatically wait for all the front-end webpage processes to complete before moving on to the next steps. Hence, all execution results will be consistent and QA engineers can save a vast amount of time investigating false alarms. More significant features from Katalon Studio 7.
- Image-based Recognition: This is a breakthrough feature in test automation and under development. In the first release of this feature, the end-users can interact with the application elements with keywords instead of writing scripts to locate them.
Over the years, more than 65,000 companies all over the world have trusted Katalon Studio, including AT&T, CVS Health, General Motors, and more. As one of the best test automation softwares for 2 consecutive years, Katalon Studio receives more than 500 positive reviews on Gartner Peer Insights.
Conclusion
Codeless test automation is going to be the main focus of organizations to automate testing projects without the coding trouble. This has become a criterion for test automation solution providers.
In summary, codeless test automation tools empowers both the product and business teams to align their scope of knowledge, reduce bottlenecks, save time and effort on maintenance practices.
With features of Codeless Test Automation, Katalon Studio is one of the must-adopt solutions for businesses in 2020. The new version, Katalon Studio 7, comes with many major updates and improvements tailored for the needs of medium and large teams.
Therefore, make sure to not miss out on trying this tool in 2020.