Companies Love Codeless; Automation Testers Hate It.

Everyone builds their own single-use Test Framework just so the next employee or agency can park it and start over on their own single-use framework.

It's an endless cycle. Before DoesQA, its founders did this too. We would join a team and start realizing their test framework's issues and limitations. Often, the test results were so flaky that nobody (not even the framework's creators) would trust them. It'd be slow, "scaling is an issue for another day" we might hear. And it wouldn't be able to test at least one critical area of the site for some incredibly frustrating reason like "checkout uses iframes, and we can't interact with iframes" — pure madness.

So, we started building "The Final Framework". Fast-forward a couple of years and a few hundred thousand lines of code, and we have DoesQA.

Excited, we started showing everyone we knew, from CTOs and Heads of Engineering to Manual and Automation Testers. Oh! CTOs, Heads of Engineering, and manual testers love what we have created. Automation Testers, on the other hand...

What is the difference between these groups? CTOs, Heads of Engineering, and Manual Testers are all quality-focused. In contrast, most Automation Testers are really SDETs (Software Development Engineer in Test). They want to solve problems and enjoy coding the solution. This is the fun part. Don't take my word for it; I wrote A Letter to Codeless Test Automation "Sceptics" on the quality assurance subreddit and was told this.

If the code is "decent", reliable, and can do everything the company wants, including visual regression, functional, and accessibility testing at scale and across multiple browsers; then there's really no issue. Assuming there's little to no difference between the cost of the codeless test automation tool and the costs/time associated with developing everything in-house.

Unfortunately, this commenter and many others, aren't doing this calculation. Coding is fun, and the tasks associated with quality assurance are "fluff that gets in the way".

Worse, when others showed an interest, they would get downvoted!

The Reddit users of r/QualityAssurance are right; Codeless Test Automation is not for Automation Testers. It's for Heads of Engineering who want fewer defects raised by end users, CTOs who want stability and confidence in the core business revenue streams, and manual testers who are stuck monotonously retesting the same steps on repeat because using automation is (apparently) only for people with coding skills.

I wrote that Reddit post eight months ago. Since then, we've had more than one thousand companies switch to DoesQA and almost a million tests have been run.

Codeless Test Automation might be something some Automation Testers hate, but it's why companies love it and are switching!