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AutomationSTAR

Test Automation Conference Europe

Track Talk T11

Why Can’t UI Automation be like ‘Normal’ Software?

John Kent

13:45-14:30 Thursday 10th October

Why is UI Test Automation so Irritating? Why is building and testing UI test automation like a big game of Whack-a-Mole? You fix one thing, re-run the pack and then something else fails just a bit further along. Why do some tests run without problems for ages and then, all of a sudden, ‘for no particular reason’…fail?

Is it possible that UI Automation is different to ‘normal’ software in some way? Is there something about the nature of UI automation that makes it more problematic? Is our automation software less reliable than the software it is testing?

John believes that because of the nature of UI Test Automation, it cannot be like ‘normal’ software in many ways. He will discuss these differences and by exploring a catalogue of UI Automation failure types, hopes to help test automation people to reduce failures and become less irritated. He also wants to show that these difficulties are part of UI Automation’s charm…. for people who enjoy solving problems.

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What you will Learn

  1. An understanding of how UI Test Automation is different
  2. A Classification of failure types
  3. Ways to reduce failures

Session Details

  • Intermediate
  • 45 mins
  • Includes 15 mins Q&A
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Session Speaker

John Kent

MD - Simply Testing, UK

John Kent has been helping organisations with test automation for over thirty years. His first testing job was in transplant immunology, testing donor’s blood to see if recipient patents would accept or reject transplanted kidneys or bone marrow. He tried to automate this testing – and failed! He became a software developer and then a tester and his next automation project, which was on mainframe, was much more successful. Since then he has built test automation frameworks in MS-Test, WinRunner, UFT, Selenium WebDriver, WinAppDriver, UIAutomation and others. These have spanned data driven, keyword driven, standard, BDD, hybrid and low-code framework approaches. He has presented at many conferences across Europe and the U.S. and wrote a chapter for the book ‘Experiences of Test Automation’. Late in the last century he was co-author of the Official Netscape Guide to JavaScript1.2.