The Business Case for AI-Powered, No-Code Test Automation

By Amit Sikka, Director, Intelligent Process & Test Automation, HuLoop Automation, Inc.

Test automation has been around for many years. Both open source and proprietary testing automation platforms, however, have always been limited by a variety of factors: finding and retaining knowledgeable and expensive technical talent, necessary time spent building complex tests—and constantly revising them when changes are made—and requiring different test automation platforms for different software environments, such as mobile, desktop and web. Fortunately, the rise of no-code, hybrid test automation platforms bring reduced costs, streamlined testing and faster time-to-market to an organization’s quality initiatives.

For years, businesses have been forced to find, hire, train, and retain high cost, technical employees to develop, deploy, and operationalize software testing. With today’s labor shortage and economic headwinds, technical workers have become increasingly expensive—and harder to find and keep.

However, with Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered, no-code testing automation, companies no longer need to have software engineers write automated test scripts. They can utilize business analysts and testing professionals—who can often be non-technical employees—to easily build automated tests with little to no prior automation experience. No-code automation enables codeless empowerment, meaning that tests can be built on the fly, in a matter of hours, not days, by non-technical workers. Any user that understands the functionality of the system being tested, can build automated tests. This is a game changer.

In previous generation testing platforms, most of which are still in use, it could take a quality or software engineer two to three business days to build a test for a singular transaction. And more complex scenarios could take a week or more.

With no-code software test automation, however, that same test for a singular transaction could take hours—not days. Even better, no-code automation platforms powered by AI could shrink that timeline down to less than two hours. Decreasing build time from days to two hours—and multiplying that by the hundreds or thousands of interactions a company may be testing—means a significant acceleration of time to market.

By enabling parallel testing, which leading platforms support, no-code automation saves businesses significant time by simultaneously running multiple tests at the same time.

Historically, test automation platforms have been singularly focused, specializing in one environment, such as web, mobile or desktop-based, etc. This has meant that organizations have had to both purchase disparate testing platforms and run disparate tests in disparate environments—which required significant time, talent, and financial resources.

The next generation of test automation platforms, however, are hybrid. Hybrid platforms take a uniform testing approach across all environments within a business ecosystem. Essentially, a hybrid platform is a single, all-in-one enterprise test automation platform that can simultaneously test across all of a company’s environments, including web, mobile, desktop, integration (API) and database.

Artificial intelligence not only helps non-technical users build tests in a fraction of the time, but it also helps companies easily manage the automation. AI-powered test automation platforms offer autonomous test management capabilities such as:

• Auto-change detection – identifies what automation should happen on a login screen, for example. When changes are made to the login screen, AI has already recorded what actions should happen on that screen, even if the location or order of action has changed, and creates a test for itself based on the login screen changes.
• Auto-healing – fixes changes on the fly and doesn’t get hung up on cosmetic changes.
• Auto-repeat execution – defines in the solution that a test needs to be tried a few times before the test is declared “failed.”
• Auto-bug logging – saves time by logging defects for the user.
• Auto-versioning – when a test is changed (accidentally or intentionally), the user can go back to previous versions of the test to restore the needed version.

These capabilities save time and money.

For many companies, integrating globalization considerations, such as language, currencies, and regulations, into their testing process is a time-consuming, arduous process. For others, it’s not even attainable due to limitations in their testing platforms.

No-code, hybrid testing automation platforms integrate globalization throughout the testing process. This means that even a single test script can support multiple languages, countries, date formats, currencies and much more.

AI-powered, no-code, hybrid automation platforms are relatively new to the market, but their impact and successes so far are noteworthy. When determining which platform will best meet their software test automation needs, businesses should look for platforms that are:

• Prescriptive – solutions that automatically generate tests based on requirements and real usage patterns
• Diagnostic – applying AI to data collected from tests to identify risks and issues with potential changes, and automating decisions related to those changes
• Understanding – using natural language processing (NLP) to enable testers to express requirements in their own languages instead of describing commands in technical terms
• Change Detecting – intelligently refactoring or deleting tests from regression suites based on the enhancement of the application or changes in user journeys
• Visual – mimicking how a human would see when things don’t look right
• Secure – creating synthetic test data that mimics production without exposing private information.

Businesses are facing unprecedented financial headwinds and labor challenges, and time to market is more critical than ever. AI-powered, no-code, hybrid test automation platforms help companies keep pace in today’s competitive market by providing agility, productivity, and empowerment in testing. Organizations can not only build, but manage tests quickly and easily, and create automation that scales to keep up with businesses’ constantly changing software.

To learn more about HuLoop’s AI-powered, no-code test automation platform, click here.

Based in the Sacramento, California area, HuLoop Automation offers an AI-powered, no-code intelligent automation platform. This platform brings next generation hyperautomation innovation across key solution areas: 1.) process and task discovery, 2.) business process automation (BPA), 3.) robotic process automation (RPA), 4.) intelligent document processing (IDP), 5.) software test automation (TA) and 6.) intelligent data automation (IDA). HuLoop is used across the enterprise by both businesspeople and technology experts. The platform delivers significant revenue growth, cost savings, and productivity gains across it’s prestigious customer base. Learn more at www.huloop.ai and follow HuLoop on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.