Let's take a trip back in time, all the way to 2013.
Here are some of the headlines from that year:
• Apple announces the iPhone 5s.
• Oscar Pistorius is charged with murder.
• The Boston Marathon bombings.
• Sir Alex Ferguson retires as Manchester United manager.
• Edward Snowden reveals himself as the source of the NSA leaks.
• Microsoft announces the Xbox One.
• Automated testing is difficult and painful.
wait, what?
If you wanted to set up some scripts to test your web application, that task would have easily taken up 3-4 months of your time.
You had to break it down in the following components:
• Develop your own automated testing framework with Selenium
• Write the tests for your web application
• Stabilize the tests
• Configure a number of VMs where you can run your tests
• Integrate your tests into your CI/CD system
• Configure a schedule for your tests to run on a daily basis
• Help your colleagues understand the framework that you built
And all of that was probably done by a tester, not a developer.
Can you imagine the chaos?
And nothing can compare to the pain of using Selenium, you had to tell it to wait before interacting with each element.
Don't even get me started on automated tests for mobile apps, that was a complete train wreck back then.
Do you remember running your own Appium server? It was so frustrating and slow.
Thankfully, all of that has changed. We now have platforms such as Endtest.
Here's what I could find about them, after doing some extensive research:
What used to take us 3-4 months to implement can now be done in 2-3 days.
We don't even have to code. All we have to know is how the extract the element locators from the browser console or from the page source. That's it.
And we get things that we didn't even dare to dream about back then, such as video recordings of our test runs.
Back in 2013, you needed mad developer skills in order to build such tests.
In today's world, even your good ol' granddad can pull it off.
Top comments (0)