Websites and app competition is increasing daily, and user experience standards are also rising. To keep up with these standards, UI testing must ensure that every website feature works as intended. It is also to check whether the visual and auditory aspects of the website are pleasing to the users. Before moving ahead, let’s first understand in brief what exactly we mean by User Interface and UI testing? Then we will proceed to the tools and techniques for effective web testing of the User Interface.
The “User Interface” is the part of a website or app that users interact with. Every user’s action on the website is done on its user interface. So testing the user interface has become an increasingly important task for the developers and testers because the quality of the user interface decides the user’s impression of a website or app. Applications are designed and developed for different platforms, mobile devices, and desktops. UI tests can be conducted both manually or automated. The technique can be implemented depending on the nature of the application and the team.
Having a series of challenges and loopholes is difficult to manage and test manually. In case when the app has a limited number of UI elements to check for any discrepancies, then manual testing can be implemented. This is usually the case in initial versions of a website or app. However, when apps are layered with hundreds of UI elements and require verification, manually testing will be inefficient, time-consuming, and prone to human error.
Therefore automated web testing of UI is preferred to improve workflow, ensure a higher quality application and shorten release cycles. An automated test reduces costs, ensures actionable results, and smoothens the entire review process. However, performing automated tests does not mean that manual testing is totally eliminated; it will always have its place in development.
What is Unit Interface Testing?
Unit Interface Testing is a process of testing the aspects of any application that a user will come into contact with. This usually means testing the Usability, Performance, Functionality, and visual elements of the application to verify that they are functioning as expected. In addition, UI testing ensures that there is no bug in UI functions.
Web app comprises web elements created with CSS, JavaScript, and other programming languages. UI testing validates these elements to validate their efficacy. It’s focused on examining the visual and structural parts of the application. UI Testing covers elements like toolbars, fonts, menus, text boxes, radio buttons, checkboxes, colors, and more.
UI design and functionality are a must-win for any application, which is why developers and testers have increasingly focused on User Interface Testing as an important part of the development.
Several excellent website testing tools ensure that the website or app meets its specification and performs the proposed functions. These test automation tools provide smart automation and address test challenges. They allow the applications to be put through multiple test scenarios and for the same tests to be run repeatedly with different variables, quickly and correctly.
Tools for UI testing
Katalon Studio
Katalon Studio is an open-source test automation tool. It is one of the most powerful and all-inclusive automation solutions for API, mobile, desktop, and web app testing. It is used heavily by system integrators for UI testing. It provides features that help overcome complex challenges in web UI test automation. It also provides multiple platforms supports like Linux, Windows, and macOS.
Katalon Studio has released its new upgraded version with major improvements. You can start using Katalon to get the benefit of those exciting, innovative technologies and upgraded versions that solve the awaiting issue in Selenium, support scalable projects, share test artifacts, and more.
TestIM
TestIM is a SaaS application. After spending a lot of time and energy in maintaining an automated test environment, developers were still fearful about how a simple bug fix might break different parts of the application. Hence they developed this amazingly easy-to-use solution for UI testing.
It focuses on execution paths for complex workflows and increases the stability and extensibility of your test suites. It is mainly designed for organizations searching for an out-of-the-box solution for UI testing.
Access to TestIM technology is very easy to get. Test case creation that works right, out-of-the-box, is also very simple with the assistance of an intuitive User Interface. The sleek and impressive user experience makes its self-healing capability a division of its Smart Locator technology.
It provides an integrated solution for test automation by recommending smart locators, together with a smart easy to maintain strategy. In addition, the introduction of the Dynamic locators’ concept has made them think about and broaden more testing types like end-to-end testing, functional testing, and UI testing.
LambdaTest
For any UI tester, it is essential to provide a flawless user experience by validating that the visible components of their application look and behave as intended.
LambdaTest is a powerful test automation cloud that enables testers to automate UI testing for mobile and web applications. It allows testers or programmers to choose from multiple programming languages, like JavaScript, Python, C#, C+, etc., to create new UI tests or enhance existing ones.
With LambdaTest, you can easily test the UI elements of any application. It supports multiple testing frameworks that allow you to build stable, reliable, and scalable UI tests without a break even when the underlying code changes. In addition, with its record and replay feature, you can record your tests once and play them back across a wide range of desktop, web, and mobile technologies.
You can also run tests in parallel, on-premise, or in the cloud to reduce testing times and expand coverage. With access to real and virtual devices over 3000+ browsers, operating systems, and resolution configurations, you can ensure that your application works across every environment available to your users.
With its detailed reporting and screenshot notifications, you can quickly determine which UI tests passed or failed, pinpoint problem areas, and share information with other team members for faster resolution.
Ranorex Studio
It is the most widely used GUI Test Automation tool, developed by Ranorex GmbH, and it is globally used to test mobile, desktop, and web-based applications.
To save extra time in the current Agile Days, Ranorex Studio is one of the best in terms of GUI Automation Tools. It provides cross-browser testing for multiple browsers like Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Microsoft Edge. It produces customized test reports, including video reporting of the test execution.
Selenium
Nowadays, Selenium is the most popular, extensively used open-source test automation tool in demand. Because of its flexibility to be used on different third-party IDEs, it has increasingly raised its industry standards.
Selenium is composed of different components, and each has its own unique feature. Selenium WebDriver is the main component that allows you to generate complex and advanced automated test scripts. Selenium IDE helps to record and playback scripts in an explanatory easier-to-use view, and Selenium Grid allows remote execution of multiple tests in parallel.
Selenium test scripts can be written in most of the popular modern programming languages like C#, Java, Ruby, Python, PHP, and JavaScript. And it can automate on operating systems like Linux, Mac, Windows, and browsers like Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, etc.
UI Testing Techniques
The processes and methods of verifying a website’s user interface are referred to as UI testing techniques. Let’s discuss a few UI Testing techniques:
Scripted Testing
This refers to automated UI tests when test frameworks and tools need to be given specific directions that are designing, crafting test cases, writing test scripts accordingly, and then executing. It is just the reverse of exploratory testing; it requires pre-planned scripts regarding what to test and how to test to uncover defects and verify that an application is working how it is supposed to do.
Scripts define the test framework as well as the entries that the tester makes on each screen and the expected output of each entry. This helps the testers to compare actual results with expected ones so that they can analyze the results and report any defects that are found to the development team to pronounce tests as passed or failed.
This testing can be performed manually or supported by test automation. Because scripted testing is pre-planned, creating test scripts early in the development process helps the teams to discover missing requirements or design defects before making it into code. The test scripts and testing reports provide definite output since the application has been tested rigorously.
Exploratory Testing
Exploratory testing does not involve too much pre-planning, as exploratory testing focuses on various aspects of the user experience and outlines the user journey. Sometimes it is done manually or can be assisted by automation, and it depends on the exploratory testers when to conduct a series of tests over a range of data values; they might decide to use test automation also.
In Exploratory Testing, rather than following pre-written tests, here, one or more testers using their knowledge and experience, design tests and immediately execute them. To explore the website, they go through its functions and features to make sure that they are working correctly. After examining the findings, testers may point out additional tests to be performed or give feedback to developers.
Because of the flexibility, exploratory testing parameters usually differ for different applications. Each exploratory test depends on the website’s nature and the related user journeys it provides. This helps in identifying flaws or bugs that would not usually show up in planned automated tests.
User Experience Testing
In user experience testing, the website is tested from an end-user perspective to collect feedback like its ease of use, visual appearance, ability to meet its needs, etc.
The testing results may be gathered by real-time observations of end users who are given access to the completed but not released website, allowing them to explore the website on-site. User experience testing is done virtually using a cloud-based platform.
As an alternative, releasing a beta version of the application to end-users is especially useful when feedback is required from users at their location, and the responses get gathered by feedback forms.
With the help of the provided feedback, testers can understand what users want from a website and communicate to end-users and create user personas. Testers can then create test scenarios accordingly.
Conclusion
UI testing is very important to improve the quality of any application. The above-mentioned UI testing tools and techniques will help you ensure that the website or app looks fine and, functions the same on different browsers & platforms, and meet its specification by performing expectedly.
