The digital landscape has significantly advanced over the past 1-2 years. The new normal in web applications include a shift toward progressive web apps (PWAs), advanced responsive websites, and Flutter apps.
Ensuring both functional as well as API testing of such advance web applications is becoming harder and harder. While there are valid test automation frameworks like Selenium and Cypress, these are covering only a subset of what is needed to complete the entire quality aspects across multiple environments.
New Normal: Instant Test Automation
To address the testing challenge over time, across multiple environments, and with big and dynamic data, tools need to be more intelligent, and utilize AI/ML to really track trends, predict issues prior to them becoming more serious, and guide the developers and testers in real-time.
An instant test automation technology that can leverage a standard test automation framework such as Puppeteer to auto generate both functional as well as API tests on the fly and as things change is a game changer for app developers. This provides alerts and insights in real time that the team can act upon and move much faster.
The way sch solution works is through modeling the website under test, auto generate based on traffic and AI proper tests and runs them to provide the proper insights.
Setting up such solution is easy and needs to be done only once. Also, such tool fits systems that are built atop cloud-native, containers and Amazon ECS.
Benefits of Shifting into Instant and Intelligent Test Automation
With the need to shift left, release faster with confidence, and handle large and complex environment, teams can benefit from a self-generating testing solution that really covers more grounds that a typical code-based framework would. This does not mean that there are no benefits or need for such frameworks like Selenium and others, however, with tools like UP9, teams can complement the code related functional tests with an additional layer of quality validation that touches reliability, APIs, services, security and much more.
Case Study: Quick Tour of Puppeteer & UP9
I took the Google puppeteer framework and connected it with UP9 to try generating a nice model and test automation assets on my local machine.
After following the basic NPM installation instructions, it was easy to launch a local browser and record traffic using the tool.
From my terminal I would then run this command (‘my.new.workspace’ could be any name that the developer selects):
up9 tap:start my.new.workspace
Once I ran that command, using puppeteer, UP9 launches a chrome browser that I can start using to navigate to my website for recording all traffic, actions, API calls and other services. Upon closing the browser, the tool will process all of the flows and generate the model.
Here is the auto generated workspace that was created based on a quick tour I ran with UP9 on the Perforce and Perfecto websites:
The workspace consists of few views:
- The generic workspace with all the high-level services model (diagram),
- The contracts that were used in my recording,
- A detailed traffic analysis with the entire API calls,
- Tests that were created and mocks to be used across different environments.
These views were perceived and constructed based on service-traffic, following from the observers of UP9 that were assigned to my designated workspace.
As part of my journey, I landed on the Perfecto free-trial website, and the tool was able to generate the API calls (Request/Response) and allow me to validate that is was working as expected (see below)
If I wanted to also run my auto-generated tests, I have within the UP9 portal (fully SaaS and web-based) a tests area from where I could launch my tests as well.
Bottom Line
As the DevOps market mature towards more intelligent testing using AI and ML, and as the systems under tests (SUTs) are also progressing, there needs to be a realization within the teams that their processes could be improved dramatically using such technologies. Developers productivity together with consistent app quality were a CIO/IT manager top of mind for a long while, and with the recent advancements in the market, teams can really enjoy a new era of smarter ways of working.
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