Greeshma Kema

Introduction: E-commerce applications need to be active at all times to meet the needs of increasingly demanding customers. This means that the software development process for such applications has to be able to handle constant change and churn in a timely manner. One of the biggest challenges in continuously delivering quality software is ensuring that the testing process can keep up with the pace of development. This is where automation tools come in.  Though there are hundreds of commercial and open source automation platforms are available in the market today, In this article, we are going to discuss how a selenium based hybrid framework can be used to enable continuous testing  in the development and maintenance of an e-commerce application.  Common challenges in testing an E-commerce application   Web applications are under immense pressure to offer a streamlined and satisfying digital customer experience while ensuring the quality of their product. In order to achieve this, they must use shift-left and enable continuous testing throughout the software development life-cycle. However, this is easier said than done. Many e-commerce applications are complex, with a hybrid architecture that consists of both legacy and modern components. This can make it difficult to set up a continuous testing framework that covers the entire application.  Considering hybrid selenium based framework  A typical hybrid framework is a combination of both Data-Driven and Key-word driven framework that has been built on top of selenium. Selenium is an open-source popular web-based automation tool. It supports popular browsers like Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, works on all major OS and its scripts are written in various languages i.e. Java, Python, JavaScript, C#. This framework is basically code structure that makes code maintenance easy and efficient. Using hybrid framework leads to increased code reusability, higher portability, reduced cost of script maintenance, and better code readability. It is based on the principle of shift-left testing, which means that tests are run as early as possible in the software development process.  Why hybrid framework is necessary for e-commerce applications?  Hybrid framework is particularly well-suited for testing web applications built using the Selenium tool and available for use with a number of popular Continuous Integration (CI) tools, such as Jenkins. Enables Continuous testing for e-commerce applications. It helps to ensure the quality of the product, prevent production issues, and reduce the need for regression testing. By using it, e-commerce organizations can easily set up a continuous testing framework that covers the entire application.  A hybrid framework allows testers to choose the most appropriate tools and techniques for different testing tasks. This can be particularly useful for e-commerce applications, which may have a wide range of features and functionalities that need to be tested and can help reduce the time & effort required to test the application that need to be released on tight timelines.  Steps to enable hybrid framework for continuous testing of an e-commerce applications:  Set up a continuous integration (CI) server: A CI server is a tool that automatically builds and tests your application every time you push code changes to version control. This helps you catch bugs and other issues early in the development process.  Choose a testing framework: There are various testing frameworks available for different programming languages. Some popular options include JUnit for Java, PyTest for Python and Mocha for JavaScript. Choose a framework that is well-suited to your application and the language you are using.  Write test cases: Test cases are the individual tests that your testing framework will run. They should cover a range of scenarios and test the different features of your application. You should aim to have a good balance of unit tests, which test individual components of your application, and integration tests, which test how those components work together.  Set up test automation: Once you have written your test cases, you can automate them using your CI server. This means that every time you push code changes, the CI server will run your tests automatically to ensure that the code is working as expected.  Monitor test results: As your tests run, you should monitor the results to see which tests are passing and which are failing. This will help you to identify any issues with your code and fix them quickly.  By following these steps, you can set up a hybrid framework for continuous testing of e-commerce applications and ensure that it is working correctly.  Some more additional points:  Framework was designed to accelerate the test automation.  Most importantly, you need to develop a test plan that identifies the key functionalities of the e-commerce application that need to be tested continuously. These could include checkout, payment processing, order tracking, and user account management, among others. Additionally, it should map the testing resources so that the framework can be utilized efficiently.  Create positive and negative test scenarios with multiple test data to obtain maximum coverage.  With framework one can complete tests faster, which is essential in a field where customers need top-notch software that runs quickly.  It helps in implementing Continuous Integration (such as Jenkins) to check the build quality as soon as any change is made to the code.  Jenkins keeps track of results and displays them as a trend graph. This provides a clearer picture of how previous tests have performed.  Using framework, you can set up to automatically record results and share them with the team once tests are completed.  It ensures the tests are executed more consistently by automated tests.  Regularly review and update the testing process to ensure that it is effective and efficient.  However, some e-commerce web applications can be difficult to automate due to their dynamic nature. They change their content and functionality based on the user’s actions, so it’s hard to test them in the same way you would do for traditional web pages or apps.  There are several challenges involved in automating dynamic web applications. Some challenges include:  Identifying the elements on the page  Navigation across pages  Form submission  Handling popup windows  Waiting for page

Do you want to become a Scriptless automation test engineer? If yes, then this article is for you. What is Scriptless Test Automation?  A Method of creating automated test scripts that do not require coding or programming skills. Testing that serves to reduce the time required for creating automated tests. Automated testing guarantees to perform testing without the requirement of code.  Let’s go a little deeper into scriptless testing and make automation simpler for testers.  Why Codeless Automated Testing is gaining popularity? In the current times of DevOps/Agile, speed continues to be the prime driver throughout the software engineering (CI/CD) process. To accelerate the test automation process, industry leaders in the Quality Engineering space often prefer testing tools and frameworks that require little-to-no code as part of the testing script development process: low-code, no-code, and codeless/scriptless. These types of testing are almost the same. The testing tools using a low-code/scriptless approach allow the test engineers/test developers to create the test scripts without any previous coding experience. Platforms that are based on coding/programming are getting outdated because of the initial time taken to develop the automation framework, the longer time to develop the scripts, and also when it comes to testing maintenance and so on. When you consider a codeless test automation platform (or any other testing tool for that matter), keep in mind that the tool will never 100% replace all your manual testing. It perfectly makes sense for some scenarios to be tested manually that need to most intelligent execution using an expert’s “human touch” due to several environmental reasons. However, there would be several types of tests that are the right candidate for codeless scripting, e.g. scenarios that are repeatedly tested and not much functionality change involved. What is the difference between Script & Scriptless Automation?  Script:  Test steps manually defined before execution.  step1->step2->step3->step4->step5…  Scriptless:  Test steps generated during test execution based on available actions. So, you can move from manual to automation with no code using scriptless and this can increase your speed and test robustness.   Scriptless test automation can help you including:  Test automation coverage scenarios. Improve Quality (enhance quality). Create stable automation. Accelerate quality delivery. No coding required/involves low coding. Thinks like the end-user(customers). Make changes to tests easily. Testing delays (You can speed up test cycles by using scriptless by enabling your business testers). Scriptless Automated Testing Methods:  NLP (natural language processing): Model-based testing Image-based scriptless Recording screenshots Drag and drop-based object mapping Keyword-driven testing Object-driven testing AI Bots for test automation.  Why do we require scriptless automation testing tools?   Test automation can’t succeed without the help of effective test automation tools. It will be more useful to know which automation testing tools are the best as per the user behavior.  To automate tests using tools instead of writing test scripts.   Reduces your time spent on test maintenance with their self-healing ML algorithm. Easy, better, and fast results (faster creation of test automation). Cut Down Costs (decreases cost). Search & Automate. Few clicks are all it takes. Built-in hybrid framework. Automated suggestions. Focus more on testing. To become a test automation engineer coding is mandatory. Right?  Suppose, you want to become a selenium test engineer then the coding is required to write the test scripts by using any programming language like python, java, or JavaScript to automate the web applications.  But if you are not good at programming language and you don’t have any scripting knowledge then the following scriptless/codeless automation testing tools are recommended.  What are the most popular automation testing tools available in the IT industry?  Today, we see a lot of new automation tools and platforms coming up where they have recorded and replay and create our entire automation test or automation project without doing any coding or very less coding required. Enlisted below are some of the automation testing tools which are helpful to automation testers.  1. Katalon Studio: It is one of the free open-source automation testing tools. It has been built with readily available features. You just need to configure the software and use it for automation. It is used to automate Web, Mobile Desktop, and API automation testing. Katalon also works with other tools like JIRA, Slack, and such.  Katalon Studio Website-https://www.katalon.com/  2. Appium: It is an open-source test automation framework for mobile web, and hybrid applications on iOS mobile, Android mobile, and windows desktop platforms. Appium is designed on a server, and the user gains access to its automation framework through a business person/dealer.  Appium Website-https://appium.io/  3.TestingWhiz: Testing Whiz is a Codeless Automation Testing Tool for Software, Web, Mobile, Database, Cloud, Web Services, and API testing. It is very helpful to provide global solutions & software companies for their web applications. We can automate the applications by using the play and record option and also drag and drop commands as well.  Testing Whiz Website-https://www.testing-whiz.com/  4. Perfecto Scriptless: We can automate the web, mobile, and AI testing web applications as well. It is completely AI-based maintenance & also supports cross-browser execution, cloud-based collaboration and schedule and monitoring, and intelligent reporting and debugging and it also supports integration software.  Perfecto Scriptless-https://www.perfecto.io/  5. Tosca: It is a license-based version. It is a software automation testing tool. We can do end-to-end software application testing. It is used for GUI, API, web application, and mobile application testing.  Tosca Website-https://www.tricentis.com/resources/tosca-automate-ui/  Conclusion: Codeless testing is evolving at a very rapid pace and there are several commercial platforms entering the market every now and then. Hence, I would recommend purchasing  a platform that is futuristic and AI powered. I would also recommend keeping substantial consideration for analytics and reporting capabilities of the scriptless testing platform, as the future is all about analytic based Dashboards, auto-healing, auto decision making abilities using the data trend and so on that takes advantage of AI/ML. I hope this article was insightful to provide some food for thought around why to consider scriptless testing platform. Will be happy to help in case you have any