Testim AI-powered UI & End-to-end Test Automation

Shawn Jaques, Testim, https://testim.io

Testim Automate was the first AI-powered UI and end-to-end test automation solution enabling fast test authoring and stable tests. The Testim UI makes it easy for any user to write and configure tests quickly. Developers can extend flexibility through coded JavaScript steps that run inside or outside of the browser, network mocking, API testing, and more. 

Web Site: https://testim.io
Version tested: Testim is a SaaS application. Testing was performed in June 2021.
System requirements: Chrome browser for recording and editing tests
License & Pricing: Free (up to 1000 test runs/month), Essentials, and Professional versions with increasing features in each plan and licensing based on test runs. More information on https://www.testim.io/pricing/
Support: Premium 24/6 chat support, on-demand, live training, online documentation, and community support. More information on https://help.testim.io/docs

Installation

Testim is a SaaS application that connects to a Chrome extension for recording test cases. The Chrome extension takes less than one minute to install.

Documentation

The complete documentation for Testim Automate is available online and consists of user guides (https://help.testim.io/docs). To read more about product features, pricing, or other test automation resources, check out Testim.io.

Fast and Flexible Authoring

Testim uses a Chrome extension to record UI actions. While recording, if Testim recognizes a pattern from a previous test, it will suggest auto-completing that part of the use case with a shared group.

Objects are rendered in the visual test editor as discrete steps with thumbnails and properties and can be moved, deleted, shared, or grouped with other actions and shared across tests. You can validate output with assertions of text, values, CSS/HTML, PDFs, emails, and more. Users can insert additional code-like features, including conditions and loops, to determine when and how steps run. Any variable can be parameterized for data-driven testing, including variables in shared groups.

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Developers can also insert JavaScript into any step (including within a shared group) to run inside or outside the browser and extend the solution to handle nearly any UI situation.

Testim even helps ensure that tests are clean with auto-grouping suggestions that identify duplicate steps and replace them with reusable groups.

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AI-powered stability

Testim uses AI to analyze the DOM, understand the relationships between elements, and assign a locator score that locks in each element. If developers modify element attributes such as the color, class, text, location, etc., the AI will still locate the element to keep tests from failing. Stability helps reduce test maintenance and minimize the disruption caused by false failures.

Testim also can recognize shadow DOM and random CSS class names and automatically adjust the locator scores to maintain element lock-in.

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Execute cross-browser tests

You can run tests on-demand or schedule a test run within Testim. It’s also easy to run your test in the CI by simply copying a Testim-generated script and pasting it to your CI tool to establish UI testing process gates within the CI pipelines.

Tests can be parallelized and run across all major browsers on Testim’s included test grid or any Selenium-compatible test cloud.

Scale Automation

Testim also has some features that they call TestOps to help organizations better scale their tests and teams. TestOps includes features for management and organization, process control, and data insights. Some of the more interesting TestOps features include test status, which enables users to treat tests differently in the CI depending on their lifecycle, test owner, for assigning responsibility, and control features like pull requests and three-way merge (with diffs) to ensure changes to tests are approved.

Report results

Testim has a dashboard for quick visualization of test results with drill down into the individual tests. Testim aggregates test failures for similar reasons to help triage troubleshooting efforts. If a test fails, users can drill into the test to see the step where it faltered, look at expected and actual screenshots at every step, and view network and console logs pre-parsed and ready at the step. Bugs are easily converted to tickets and submitted to GitHub, Jira, Trello, etc., in minutes.

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Conclusion

Testim Automate helps agile teams create stable UI and E2E tests fast. Their fast authoring with code flexibility boosts coverage, AI-powered stability reduces maintenance, and TestOps helps scale teams and testing efficiently. You can get a free account at Testim and run up to 1000 tests per month for free: https://app.testim.io/.

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This article was originally published in June 2021