Congrats: you have a mobile app with a growing user base that is generating revenue!
Your reward? Having higher stakes associated with the usability of your app.
You cannot afford to ship bugs. You must have testing coverage in place to catch issues before they get shipped to your users. For most teams, this means investing in and implementing mobile test automation.
This is a long term investment for any mobile team, because the real “cost center” of mobile test automation is the upkeep of your automated test suite.
The burden of test suite maintenance for scripted tests
Test suite maintenance is an unavoidable part of your development cycle: testing needs will change as your app, priorities, services, etc. change. However, the value of automation is diminished if your automation solution is not easy to maintain.
There are two core issues when it comes to maintaining a scripted testing suite:
- You need someone who is an expert in your app’s code base AND the scripting language to make any required changes
- Small changes to your app can easily cause false negatives or positives, requiring near constant upkeep to “tune” scripts
Scripting means you are reliant on engineers to update and maintain your tests. Instead of scaling a QA team, you need to scale a team of test engineers, or cannibalize the time of your existing mobile developers…both of which are costly propositions.
This is how so many mobile teams get caught up in a cycle of heavily investing both time and money in creating scripted tests, breaking tests, validating results, adjusting tests, repeat.
Simplify test suite maintenance with other automated solutions
Waldo was built to lower the barrier of entry for mobile test automation, providing an automation solution that can be built and maintained using the team and resources you currently have. We prioritize features that enable anyone (technical or not) to build end-to-end, automated mobile tests, then own and maintain them going forward.
Our customer’s tests do not break as frequently as scripted tests, and when tests need to be updated, doing so is much easier with a purpose built feature set. The result? A dramatic reduction in the overall time spent on test maintenance.
We are able to deliver this by focusing on three core elements of our platform:
- The source tree, allowing us to significantly reduce test fragility across your suite
- Point and click features that simplify the actual work around editing tests
- Modular test building strategy that embeds DRY practices into your Waldo suite
Limit the fragility of tests across your suite with a superior source tree
The most common source of test maintenance work for automated suites is the brittleness of scripts. Even minor changes to your app, no matter how insignificant to the end user or even the function of the app, can break many scripted tests.
Where renaming an element can break a script, Waldo’s source tree allows it to recognize the element as a user would: regardless of changes to the underlying implementation details.
Simplify test maintenance to be just point and click
When your app changes, your tests will have to change. Changes that do not impact the fundamental functionality of your application should not require massive rewriting or re-recording of your testing scenarios.
Modifying an interaction, adding or removing a step from your test scenario, or even adjusting an assertion, can be done in just a few clicks with Waldo. You can go directly into the step that you want to change, be presented with your options, and make your changes then and there in seconds.
Many tools on the market require users to rewrite entire scenarios to make even small changes. Waldo users rarely have to go into the Test Builder to entirely recreate scenarios once their core suite is built out.
Unlock suite sustainability with a modular approach
Our platform supports a modular approach to test creation with the goal of not only re-using existing work to build out your test scenarios, but simplifying test maintenance.
Creating a test chain in Waldo allows you to modularize components of test scenarios (i.e. the steps to login, create a post, add something to a cart, etc.) so that if an update occurs that impacts any of these popular user flows, you can easily edit those steps without having to individually update every test that includes them.
Waldo makes mobile test automation more accessible: providing a manageable entry point for technical and non-technical teams alike. We believe that test automation is critical to maintaining a stable app, and a high quality development lifecycle…but it should not require a total overhaul of your team.
Reach out today to learn how we can unlock the benefits of automation for your team in just 30 days.
Automated E2E tests for your mobile app
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