I am Spending too Much Time Fixing Flaky Tests- Can AI Really Help?
One of the biggest problems with UI based test automation is "Maintenance". A lot of effort is spent on maintaining the tests than writing actual tests. A recent study suggested that about 30% of testers time is spent on maintenance. This leads to wastage of valuable time and effort by teams and this time would be better spent on exploring the actual application. This problem of maintenance is not something new and has existed for the past several decades. There have been many tools, frameworks and approaches that have come up to try solving this problem but none have been successful till now. This is also the reason why UI based test automation is looked up on with high skepticism.
Now with the help of Artificial Intelligence (AI) we finally have a solution to this problem. The AI helps to analyze the DOM in real time and helps to extract multiple attributes for each and every element the user interacts with the application; instead of just one attribute like currently existing frameworks. So, even when an element attribute changes the tests do not immediately fail rather the AI helps to choose from the list of already extracted attributes to successfully locate the element. This strategy is called "Dynamic Location Strategy" and this is going to be the future of UI Based Test Automation. In this talk, I will cover the basics of AI, discuss the current problems with UI based test automation, discuss with live demos how AI based Dynamic Locators help to make your tests more resilient to change and in turn helps in building smarter, stable and much faster tests. Finally, will cover the future of AI based testing.
Key Takeaways:
- Learn the Basics of AI
- Current challenges with test automation
- How AI helps to solve these challenges with the help of Dynamic Locators
- Future of AI based testing
Raj Subramanian is a former developer who moved to testing to focus on his passion. Raj currently works as a Developer Evangelist for Testim.io. He actively contributes to the testing community by speaking at conferences, writing articles, blogging, making videos on his youtube channel and being directly involved in various testing-related activities. He currently resides in Chicago and can be reached at raj@testim.io and on twitter at @epsilon11. He actively blogs on www.testim.io and his website www.rajsubra.com. His videos on testing, leadership and productivity can be found here – http://www.rajsubra.com/my-youtube-channel/
