Test automation using FlowWright

Learn about FlowWright's self-test functionality

Last published at: April 18th, 2024

Today software is tested at many levels, as we and our customers have found. Below, we highlight some of the common tests that are performed on software today. 

Common software testing includes:

  • User interface testing – testing for UI functionality and consistent look and feel
  • Unit testing – API level testing to make sure it's functional
  • Scenario testing – testing stories, testing using combinations of API functions
  • Performance testing – UI and back-end performance

Today, most organizations have Quality Assurance (QA) teams that have QA folks who are writing test cases manually and executing them against the product manually. What’s wrong with this method, nothing- it's just time-consuming. When you have product deadlines to meet, QA testing taking 1-2 months to execute can cripple an organization's efforts. 

In most cases, unit testing does not find many or all of your issues, typically it finds less than 10% of the critical issues. If you want to find what you are missing, then you must use scenario-based testing where multiple API calls/functions can be/are tested. In any test method execution, 2 main steps are performed:

  • The test method itself, maybe a # of test steps
  • The verification processes

After each test, or after executing a # of steps within a test, a verification process must be implemented to see if the test performed the test scenario. Measurements are always a key and should be in place with any tests.

FlowWright utilizes itself to test functionality and scenarios within the product; it can also test itself overnight and report any issues with functionality the following day. How is this done? FlowWright utilizes many testing steps that execute the test itself but also uses a verification step to verify if the functionality tested passed or failed. Tests that are performed are scenario-based and therefore can find issues with the software much quicker than any other method of testing.

The above test method is great for functional testing, but what about UI-based testing?

Typically UI based testing is more complicated, but not impossible. There are several good tools out there for UI-based automated testing, some of quite expensive such as QTP, but there are also free and powerful tools such as Selenium. Selenium requires coding a bit, but code can be easily turned into reusable workflow steps within FlowWright. FlowWright can execute a workflow that in turn performs selenium functions that will test the UI functionality.

Another great advantage of using FlowWright for testing is to design your testing graphically and also view the execution graphically.