Cowardly ‘Automated Testers’ use “GUI Test Automation is hard” as an excuse to avoid, instead do only API Testing
Come on, be a software testing engineer, do test as an end-user would. API Testing is very limited, compared to end-to-end (via UI) test automation. If doing properly, end-to-end (via UI) test automation is not that hard, in fact, fun and quite satisfying.
--
In a recent LinkedIn chat, one “Automation Engineer” said this:
“ I happen to consider myself a good automation engineer, and I have worked with many other good ones”
“We aren’t supposed to verify everything with the GUI.”
“I think the test pyramid confirms that the GUI test is the most expensive and should only be done for the things that can’t be verified on the layers below”
This view is fairly common by fake automated testers (sadly, too many of them, considered themselves OK, sigh!). It might sound reasonable, but it is wrong.
Table of Contents:
∘ 1. ‘The World Quality Report: “ensuring end-user satisfaction is now a top QA priority”
∘ 2. Why “end-to-end user testing” is more necessary than ever?
∘ 3. No End-to-End Testing (via UI), how can you verify a user story is done?
∘ 4. “But I say I will test GUI when the parts cannot be done in underlying tiers”.
∘ 5. “GUI Test Automation is expensive”
∘ 6. “How can I learn automated end-to-end UI testing?”
1. ‘The World Quality Report: “ensuring end-user satisfaction is now a top QA priority”
Yes, end-user, i.e., testing as a user would, aka, via GUI. For web apps, this means, automated test scripts drive the app in a web browser (typically, Chrome).
