Traditional focus of Test Automation in many organizations has so far been based on the readily available, cost-effective tools rather than the ones that are best suited to meet the business requirements, have a shorter time-to-market and are compatible with the technology stack of the applications under test.
The market is shifting as the organization seeks greater business value and agility in any solution they plan to invest on. Therefore, it is imperative for every organization to have a well-defined set of practices, processes and parameters to gauge the compatibility of the varied automated tools with the application under test.
On that note, we recently conducted a comparative analysis of Coded UI with the currently prevalent Open Source and Commercial Testing Tools. Coded UI is an automation framework which enables a user to record a set of action, generates the code for the same and allows the user to playback the recorded actions. It also gives the flexibility to write the custom code using a hybrid automation approach (keyword and data-driven).
Advantages of Coded UI:
- Excellent support for applications running on Microsoft Technologies (Silver Light, WPF).
- Record actions and generate code using Test Builder.
- Well integrated with TFS/Test manager
- Competitive cost advantage over QTP
Disadvantages:
- No support for Java/Flash applications.
- Record and playback is supported for IE only. (Firefox supports only playback).
- No in-built object spy– user needs to record the actions.
- Complex Object repository mapping.
- Require good knowledge in C# for custom coding.
The comparative evaluation was done by Tavant’s Automation CoE team. Some of the key comparison parameters that were taken into consideration are: Learning curve involved, Script Development Time, Ease of Use, Maintenance and Re-usability.
Stay tuned to see a detailed evaluation report on how Coded UI fared against QTP and Selenium. However, I must add that the “fitment” or suitability of a specific tool or set of tools needs to be assessed based on the Enterprise-wide business priority as well as the overall objective that is intended for implementing test automation.
