A Guide to Automated UI Testing: What to Do and What You Need

Ready to automate your UI testing?

We've pulled together this 101 guide as a starting point. If you're new to automated UI testing, need more info on the process itself, or are looking for a few best practices to optimize your testing workflows, you're in the right place.

Read on for detailed info about what automated UI testing is, and how to do it well.

What is Automated UI Testing?

User interface (UI) testing ensures that the visual elements, functionality, and usability of a user interface meet your requirements ahead of a code release. This could include:

• Making sure elements of a website display correctly across web and mobile browsers
• Testing how long an interface takes to load or complete important actions
• Checking whether colours and fonts are displaying correctly
• Measuring how easily users can complete key actions on your interface, such as adding an item to a cart
• Ensuring that elements like buttons and navigation bars work as designed

It's easy to think of UI testing as something that's GUI exclusive - icons, buttons, and menus are inherently visual things, after all! But, UI testing is important for all types of UI, and is an increasingly important part of creating appealing voice and natural language UIs as the way we interact with technology evolves.

Automated UI testing is simply using automated testing platforms to perform UI testing, rather than carrying it out manually.

Why Automate UI Testing?

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a user in possession of a computer or mobile device must be in want of an intuitive user interface that doesn't make it annoying to complete basic tasks.

As engineers, we know how important the UI is - it's a user's first impression of your product, and a poor experience makes it exponentially more likely that they will bounce and never return.

At the same time, engineers settle for slow, inefficient manual processes that let errors slide through because of a perception that UI testing is too complex to automate entirely.

This isn't the case. Using today's AI tools, it's actually pretty simple to automate UI testing (we map out the process for you in the next section). And, once you've done so, you'll enjoy:

• Expanded test coverage
• Faster tests
• Fewer bugs making it through to production
• Significantly reduced time spent on test maintenance

What Types of Automated UI Testing Are There?

You can test the code behind your UI in a variety of ways - both functionally ('does it work?') and non-functionally ('does it work to standards that we have defined?').

Here are a few of the most common types of UI tests.

Type of test	What it does
Unit	Quickly tests a unit of code to check whether it works in isolation
Functional	Makes sure elements behave as they are supposed to, e.g., buttons click, form fields accept input
End to end	Validates your UI and its dependencies from start to finish
Regression	Ensures changes to the codebase haven't accidentally affected your UI
Performance	Measures UI response time, load capacity, and resource usage
Accessibility	Ensures your UI works for users with different access needs, e.g., testing screen reader compatibility
Exploratory	Tests by exploring without predefined test cases - can be recorded for playback or automated with AI tools

Automating UI Testing in 4 Easy Steps

1. Analyze the Requirements For Your Project

Understanding your project's requirements, scope, timeline, and budget is vital in choosing where and how to automate your UI testing. You should consider:

• How much coverage is ideal, and how much is realistic
• Which functionalities and features are the highest priority for UI testing

When it comes to how to automate your UI testing, you have a choice of approaches. Of course, you could build test scripts that automatically validate your chosen assertions - using a natural language low-code test editor is a fast, efficient way to do this.

If you're looking for a more visual approach to UI testing, you could try:

Testing with capture/playback tools
This involves an engineer performing a series of actions once, then replaying these as automated tests using a UI testing platform. It's a seriously fast, user-friendly, and low-code approach to building tests that eliminates a lot of repetitive work - ideal for frequent, simple tests.

Model-based testing
In model-based testing, engineers build models that mimic your system's behavior, which can run complex, high-performance test cases that can dive a little deeper than most playback tools. It's much slower, but can make it easier to test complex scenarios effectively.

2. Build and Run Your Tests

You know what you need to do. Now's the time to do it.

This can be quite a time-intensive step for engineers, because 'traditional' test automation tools like Selenium require you to write your test scripts (in code) from scratch. Sure, once they're there you can reuse them, but you'll need to put the effort in upfront.

Good news: you don't need to do this anymore. Opt for an AI-based UI testing tool instead, and you'll be able to:

• Record test actions once to generate a test script
• Generate test scripts using natural language processing, with no coding needed
• Get AI generated test steps in minutes
• Use plain English to search and locate elements

This saves your team hours of effort creating tests - so you can test significantly more of your code in the same timeframe!

3. Find, Fix, and Run Again

Just like manual testing - but much faster.

The latest AI testing tools help you identify what's gone wrong much quicker, so you can consider your days of trawling through lines of code well and truly over. This is because:

• AI testing agents can pinpoint code that's faulty and fix it automatically
• You can locate code elements quickly via plain English search terms
• AI-powered predictive analytics identifies high-risk areas based on previous testing activity, so you can dedicate more time to them and reduce errors in the first place

Obviously, you'll run your tests again after finding and fixing - but given how quickly automated UI testing runs, this won't add much time at all to your project timeline.

4. Maintain your tests

…or don't, depending on what sort of testing tool you use.

Automated tests built on non-AI platforms still need manual maintenance - tests flake and become redundant as your apps (and the tools and third-party libraries that support them) evolve. If your tests don't evolve too, you leave your applications vulnerable to bugs leaking to production.

AI tools can take the bulk of the maintenance work away from your engineers by:

• Automatically fixing broken or flaked tests
• Building tests that aren't affected by changes in the DOM

Let's face it - test maintenance is no-one's favorite part of the job. By letting AI do the work, you get it done much quicker and remove human errors that always find their way into repetitive, boring processes (because the human mind is not good at these).

At the same time, your engineers can reinvest hours into building great new features, identifying user needs for new products, and any other number of tasks that require the creative problem solving skills your human team brings to the table.

Automated UI Testing: 5 Best Practices to Keep in Mind

1. Build a Prioritized List of Test Cases

Consider which of your app's features are the most important, and build a list of priorities for testing. Work your way down the priority list, so that your key priorities are tested first.

2. Include Edge Cases for Accurate Testing

Testing unusual or extreme cases is super important - this shows how the UI handles interactions users might not expect. These could include incorrect form inputs, error messages, and boundary conditions.

3. Mock External Dependencies

Make sure your testing environments simulate any external services or APIs your UI uses. This ensures results are as accurate as possible, whilst avoiding test results depending on these external services.

4. Use Realistic Test Data

Using realistic data (either anonymized production data or data generated by a reliable AI tool) ensures that your tests mimic real-world scenarios and provide accurate results. Avoid using hard-coded values or overly-simplistic data sets.

5. Run Visual Regression Tests After Code Changes

Regression testing after updating your codebase ensures that changes you've made haven't accidentally altered your UI. Visual regression testing tools like Momentic can capture and compare screenshots to identify layout shifts, color changes, or other visual discrepancies.

Momentic: Your Ultimate Automated UI Testing Tool?

“Momentic makes it 3x faster for our team to write and maintain end to end tests.”
Alex Cui, CTO, GPTZero

We'd love to see if Momentic's AI testing features could help you minimize the time you spend running UI tests and maximize focus on valuable project work.

If, like Alex and his team, you're keen to save over two thirds of the time you spend on key testing processes, why not schedule a conversation with our team?