Automated UI testing in a traditional software development process

Abstract

With agile methodologies becoming increasingly more common, software test automation is also becoming a more relevant topic. However, adopting agile can be radical and it requires a lot of initial resource investments and it can easily go wrong or prove to not be effective enough. This thesis examines if UI test automation can effectively be used without fully adopting the agile methods. This thesis starts with first chapters examining agile methodologies and the different techniques to test and develop software. The fourth chapter examines UI testing specifically, and the different approaches to it. In the fifth chapter a research overview is conducted to compare common UI test automation tools, and the best suited tool is picked for a test case for chapter six. The test case compares an automated UI testing tool, Katalon Studio, with a manual testing method with use case scenarios in a web application. The test case suggests that adopting automated UI tests in a traditional software development process is not effective enough. The automated tests are unreliable and it takes a lot of time to cover all the different functionalities. As the tested application is not designed with automated UI tests in mind, the application proved to be tested more effectively by a user manually.