What Is Low Code Testing? Everything You Need to Know

Last week, a product manager friend of mine texted me to inform me of how they’ve automated their app’s onboarding flow, in a short time, even when they didn’t know an ounce of JavaScript. Just a few months ago, they were racking their brains over how to get the mammoth task done with limited bandwidth. Their team of five manual testers was drowning, and every time the engineering team asked for automated tests, they’d have to explain why it would take three months just to hire someone who could write Selenium scripts. 

Does this sound familiar?

This conversation happens more often than you’d think. For most QA teams across companies, “lack of time to ensure quality” is always the biggest challenge in picking up automation tasks. 

To top it, the ever changing nature of software products also adds to the peril. Enter low-code testing. It’s not magic, and it’s definitely not perfect, but it’s changing who gets to participate in test automation.

Low-code testing lets you build automated tests using visual interfaces instead of writing code from scratch, like assembling IKEA furniture versus crafting furniture from raw lumber

What Is Low-Code Testing? 

Low-code testing lets you build automated tests using visual interfaces instead of writing code from scratch, like assembling IKEA furniture versus crafting furniture from raw lumber. One requires an engineering degree, while the other just needs patience and the ability to decipher those weird pictographic instructions. 

Instead of staring at blank code editors (and inevitably Googling “how to write Selenium scripts” for the nth time), you can use a variety of approaches, like dragging and dropping pre-built components, or recording interactions as you perform them, or writing tests using plain English (or what we’d like to call “leveraging natural language processing”), depending on your choice of low-code testing platform.

A lot of platforms start with record-and-playback. You can just use your app normally while the platform watches and captures everything you do. After you’ve gotten the basic flow captured, you can add your own validation points and test data with minimal code. 

Execution is where these platforms really shine, and your tests can run across a wide choice of browsers, without the need to set up different environments. Most of these platforms can run these tests in parallel, thus speeding up the execution of the test suite.

The cool part is that these platforms usually run on the same automation engines (Selenium, Playwright, etc.) that traditional automation uses, so you’re not sacrificing reliability for ease of use. You’re just getting a friendlier way to interact with the same technology.

Why Use Low-Code Testing?

A few years back, people would’ve still had reservations about the “low-code” thing. But if you observe now, a lot of teams have begun to adopt these platforms and have made considerable strides in tasks that had been earmarked for the backlog in the past. People who’ve never touched automation are creating tests that actually catch bugs.

 A huge benefit is the fact that domain expertise can now be put to good use, and one doesn’t need to wait to acquire specific, niche technical skills to contribute. It bridges the skill gap and helps domain experts without the need to become programmers first. 

Folks with actual technical experience can now move to solving harder problems and moving bigger rocks. This ensures wider test coverage and better resource efficiency. This is a win-win for all. 

Challenges in Traditional Automation Testing

I’ve seen teams struggle with the same automation problems for years:

1. Time to value is higher

Teams often spend a few months building frameworks before creating their first business-value test. This is important to set up a structure that can be reused across tests and reduce development time later. This also means that teams need to plan to spare such a huge amount of time before showing usable benefits from this endeavor.

2. Maintenance is a nightmare

Tests break constantly when UIs change. This means one needs to update the regression suite or wait much longer after the feature is stable to start with the automation. This causes a circular problem of the features having evolved as well. Thus, teams need to plan more carefully to balance this conundrum.

3. Limited participation

Traditionally, only core technical members could contribute, which created knowledge silos and bottlenecks. One had to wait for bandwidth availability or for getting folks with the right kind of expertise on the team. While expertise will be a perennial requirement, one need not wait for expertise to solve low-hanging fruit or wait for bandwidth to move bigger rocks, because they are busy automating simpler stuff.

Who Can Perform Low-Code Testing?

Low-code testing is ideal for a few groups of people within teams:

With low-code platforms, manual testers can finally translate their domain knowledge directly into automated tests

Manual testers

They are often the best candidates to use low-code testing tools. They understand user workflows well, know exactly where the edge cases in an application occur, and can think through scenarios that technical teams miss. With low-code platforms, manual testers can finally translate their domain knowledge directly into automated tests. 

QA engineers

They can use low-code testing to focus on high-value activities instead of writing repetitive test scripts. They can concentrate on test strategy, complex integration scenarios, and automation architecture while enabling broader team participation.

Product owners

They can create tests that validate requirements as they write them. When business stakeholders can translate user stories into executable tests, the feedback loop between requirements and validation becomes almost instant.

Financial services companies can use low-code testing for compliance scenarios and regulatory validation

Use Cases for Low-Code Testing

Low-code testing finds its use in various domains:

1. Financial services companies can use low-code testing for compliance scenarios and regulatory validation. For instance, they might have a use case where they need to check data storage scenarios through a variety of device combinations. This is extremely prohibitive in manual testing, but can be a good use case for low-code testing tools.
2. E-commerce teams dealing with seasonal traffic spikes during sales and constantly pushing new features in releases can benefit greatly from these tools. These platforms let them scale testing efforts during peak seasons and adjust accordingly during quieter periods without the need to build a huge team.
3. Manufacturing companies increasingly use low-code testing platforms for testing IoT systems, predictive maintenance applications, and safety-critical systems without requiring exclusive testing expertise in specific programming languages.

Challenges and Pitfalls of Low-Code Testing

Let’s face it, complex testing scenarios still need real coding. If you’re testing complex APIs, doing performance testing with custom metrics, or integrating with proprietary systems, you’d probably hit the limitations quickly. This is also where tools like Autify Nexus shine, since they are “Low-Code When You Want It, Full-Code When You Need It,” thus enabling you to add your own flavor of code in tricky integrations.

There’s still a learning curve, despite the use of natural language. These tools are definitely easier to use than traditional automation tools, but they’re not magic. One definitely needs to plan for training time and shouldn’t expect instant results.

One also has to be careful in the quality of testing using these tools. It’s very easy to fall into the trap of having tests that work and run, but that add no real value to testing the application or add huge amounts of redundant tests that take hours to run but catch no real bugs. More tests aren’t always better, in this case.

Conclusion

After observing multiple teams using low-code testing tools, I think they are worth exploring, especially in cases where you have domain experts who can’t currently contribute to automation efforts.

The teams that are getting the most value use low-code testing to enable their business experts rather than replace their technical people. If you’ve got manual testers who know your product issues inside and out but can’t contribute to automation efforts, owing to a lack of knowledge in a particular tech stack, this approach might solve a lot of problems for you.

The question isn’t whether low-code testing is perfect, it’s whether it addresses specific challenges your team faces right now. If your automation bottleneck is skills rather than tools, it’s probably worth a pilot project.

Want to see what this looks like for your specific situation? Try Autify Nexus and test the “Low-Code When You Want It, Full-Code When You Need It” approach yourself.