Automated tests that drive your application through its user interface (UI) are known as coded UI tests (CUITs). These tests include functional testing of the UI controls. They let you verify that the whole application, including its user interface, is functioning correctly. Coded UI Tests are particularly useful where there is validation or other logic in the user interface, for example in a web page. They are also frequently used to automate an existing manual test.
Coded UI Supported Technologies
Using Coded UI, one can easily test applications which has UI (User Interface). The application can be of either Web based or Windows based, coded UI supports them.
Following UI technologies Coded UI supports
Windows based Desktop Applications (Windows Forms etc)
WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation)
Web Applications (Html, Silverlight, Jscript, HTML 5)
Web Services (SOAP, ASPX etc)
Windows Phone applications (Available from Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 or later)
Windows Store applications
Comparing Coded UI with other tools
It’s very obvious here that,
Selenium does not support any Windows applications as well as WPF applications.
QTP does support Windows application, but requires .Net Plugin to be purchased and installed separately
Test complete does support Windows application, but requires plugin to be installed
No other tool, other than Visual Studio Coded UI support Windows phone application testing
No other tool, other than Visual Studio Coded UI support Windows store application testing
I have just compared some of the most commonly used popular tools against Visual Studio Coded UI testing.
Coded UI Application Testing feature
Coded UI has two different ways feature to test your applications
Coded UI Record and Playback
Coded UI Hand coding (which will involve intense coding)
The way Coded UI automation is designed by Microsoft is to target both the non-programmers as well as programmers to work with Coded UI.
Microsoft Test Manager (MTM) uses Coded UI Record and Playback feature to record all the user action and save it as a test case, which can then be used to replay while executing the test case.
Coded UI Hand coding is used prevalently while designing custom frameworks while working with larger projects.
Coded UI for Windows Mobile
The coded UI for Windows mobile is available from Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 and later, which mean all the Visual studio 2013 user, need to go for Update 2 or later (latest is Update 4) for getting the Coded UI for Windows Mobile.
Note
But the only limitation is, currently only mobile application developed with XAML us supported by Coded UI, other technologies like WinJS, Silverlight or HTML5 are not supported.
Coded UI for Windows Stores
The Coded UI for Windows Store application currently supported in Windows 8 and 8.1, also, it support only XAML applications not WinJS.
That’s all folks, I hope this article should have given you a getting started introduction of Coded UI in Visual Studio.
Please leave your comments!!!
Thanks,
Karthik KK
