What Are The Different Web Test Automation Challenges?

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web test automation challenges

According to a recent article by UiPath, a survey by Gartner highlights that more than 80% of organizations will continue or increase automation spending in the upcoming year 2022.    

With the rising competition in the market and the adoption of an agile environment, the demand for Automation is on the rise. As it not only speeds up the tasks but reduces the time spent on repetitive manual tasks. Hence, the IT world is looking towards the rising trend to gain a competitive edge.  

And for no surprise, Automation has paved its path in the software testing world too. It is to the fact that test automation solutions enhance software quality, thereby improving the test team’s productivity. In this blog, we will talk about test automation in web testing, covering the importance, challenges, and solutions associated with it.   

What Is Website Automation Testing?  

Web automation testing is a process to perform testing on the website with automation tools to evaluate website performance and efficiency. Web automation tools require less time, resources, and cost. Hence, Automation in web testing deliver not only consistent and quality website but also streamlines overall work processes.  

Importance Of Automation In Web Testing   

Organizations see test automation as a way to attain efficiency as it paves the way to innovation and problem-solving. Web test automation allows the execution of complex test cases effectively, and lets testers detect bugs at an early stage of the development cycle. Thus, the process compliments the test operations increasing test teams’ overall productivity, thereby releasing high-quality web applications. 

Some other benefits associated are:   

  • As the IT world is adopting agile methodology, automation web testing complements the “agile” scenario.   
  • Cloud technology is highly dependent on automation testing tools. Thus, web test automation plays an important role in supporting web applications on the cloud efficiently.   
  • Web test Automation improves the ease of SOA-based and REST API-based web services testing.  
  • The web test automation tools ensure 100% functional test coverage.  

Challenges Of Web Test Automation  

According to a survey by the Journal of Software Evolution and Process, “test management and test automation are considered the most challenging among all testing activities by practitioners.” Thus, in order to implement automation testing, organizations must be aware of the challenges associated with them.   

Though Web test automation ensures the delivery of highly functional and interactive web applications, there are certain challenges testers need to face:  

1. Frequent UI Changes  

Coping up with the UI changes is a recurring challenge for web test automation teams. The team misses out on developing UI tests that can be altered easily later. Thus, in web application UI, there are several components that are prone to changes due to  

  • Change in the logic or  
  • The addition of new features or   
  • New integrations in the web application with third-party tools   

2. Multiple Error Handling  

Handling errors in web test automation is one of the challenging tasks for the testing teams. In complex projects, when the volume of data is large, one error can affect the other compartment of the project easily. Basically, a chain reaction is triggered when an errored solution is scaled. Thus, teams need to be highly efficient to handle them.   

3. Long Execution Time  

Though depending upon the number of the test cases, usually Web Automation requires a long execution time. In several cases, Automation runs for one full day, and testers get a report on the next day. But when deadlines are near, the testing team suffers due to inadequate time impacting the quality release of web applications.   

4. Complex UI Elements Testing  

Today’s web applications are embedded with complex features such as flowcharts, diagrams, maps, and much more. Thus, it becomes challenging for automation teams to test complex UI elements. It requires more time and patience to perform functional and non-functional testing on complex elements. Moreover, many times dynamic HUI content can lead to failure in some test scripts adding more complexity to the automation testers’ task.   

5. Calculating ROI Of Web Testing Automation  

Web test automation call for constant changes in the test scripts. Thus, it requires more time and labor to create and maintain test automation scripts again and again. Hence, it becomes quite challenging to calculate ROI while performing web tests continuously.   

6. Choosing Right Web Automation Testing Tool  

There are several web test automation tools in the market. But real challenges arise when organizations have to make a choice. Wrong selection of tools leads to a waste of time, labor, and cost. Thus, organizations must associate with automation testing companies to understand project requirements to select the right testing tools,   

7. Maintaining Quality Code standards  

As mentioned earlier, test scripts need continual changes. So many times, testers may skip reviewing the modified scripts due to a lack of time and resources. Thus, the absence of coding standards makes the reviewing process difficult.   

How To Overcome Aforementioned Challenges?  

Here are some solutions that make web test automation implementation efficient and cost-effective:   

  1. Choose Codeless Testing Solution  

As test scripts undergo several changes, testers can choose to implement codeless or scriptless test automation solutions. The codeless scripts not only save time and labor but also simplify the automation process.   

  1. Select The Right Automation Testing Tools & Frameworks  

Project complexities and budget constraints often lead to the selection of wrong automation tools. Organizations must get in touch with software testing companies to make the right choice of automation tools and frameworks  

  1. Utilize Object Repository  

As UI test cases change frequently, Testers can utilize a shared object repository to maintain these tests initially. Not only will it reduce the need to create a large number of UI test cases, but it will also reduce test maintenance costs.   

Conclusion  

Web test automation reduces efforts and time to verify and validate web applications’ functionality. But, there are several associated challenges that need to be addressed to truly benefit from the process. Once these challenges are handled, teams can deliver high-quality, bug-free, high UX/UI web applications with faster release time in the market.   

“Automation is a way to improve business efficiency with effective solutions”