Automated User Interface Testing Made Easy

Imagine you’ve created the perfect app: It’s innovative, technically fully developed, has groundbreaking features and elaborate functionality – and your users can’t benefit from it because the user interface doesn’t work properly.

When it comes to testing, user interfaces (UIs) are often neglected. Mike Cohn’s test pyramid (see, for example, The Practical Test Pyramid) shows us why: Compared to all other testing methods, UI tests require the highest expenditure of time and the most integration. Also, manual UI testing can be quite cumbersome. Still, the user interface is a crucial part of your application. Ultimately, it’s what the users see and interact with when using your product. From their perspective, it gives information about the quality of your app as a whole. So, you don’t want to spoil that first impression, right?

Scripted system tests help you step into the shoes of your users and make sure that they can smoothly use your application: Localizing and addressing various UI elements, they simulate authentic user scenarios and check if front-end and back-end work well together. Our tutorial Add Automated System Tests to Your CI/CD Pipeline teaches you how to create these tests and automate them through a continuous integration and delivery pipeline. And it gets even better: Since version 1.74, our SAPUI5 distribution contains the UI5 Test Recorder, which is automatically available in every SAPUI5 application that uses this version or higher. This new tool supports you in creating system and integration tests by inspecting the UI and providing you with control properties and code snippets for OPA5 and UIVeri5 tests – and therefore makes UI testing so much easier! For more information, see Test Recording with UI5 Test Recorder.

As a result, we’ve created a second version of our tutorial: Add Automated System Tests with the UI5 Test Recorder to Your CI/CD Pipeline. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to use the UI5 Test Recorder to create and run automated system tests with UIVeri5, which is an SAP open-source JavaScript testing framework for SAPUI5 applications. Your test application is a simple shopping app for electronic devices that has basic functions such as a product catalog sorted by categories, a search option, and an add to cart function. When executing your tests, a test runner automatically follows the scripted scenario and checks its functionality. Have a look at how this works:

Looks cool, doesn’t it? Try it out yourself! Basically, all you need is a Jenkins instance and both a GitHub account and a repository for your CI/CD pipeline.

For more information about CI/CD, see Continuous Integration and Delivery by SAP.