What is the way forward after Coded UI deprecation
What we will do after Coded UI deprecation?
Most of us are aware about
Microsoft official announcement that Coded UI will no longer be available after
Visual Studio 2019. This news triggers the question for those teams who are using
Coded UI, what they will do? We have listed down here some points that might
help to take a decision.
Why Microsoft is deprecating Coded UI Test?
Coded UI tests are used for
UI-driven functional automation of web apps and desktop apps. Open source UI
testing tools such as Selenium and Appium have gained momentum in recent years, have a
strong community backing and are now pretty much industry standards. Coded UI’s
cross-browser testing solution was itself based on Selenium. Additionally, both
Selenium and Appium work cross-platform and support multiple programming
languages.
Other important point is that Test
automation focus is also shifting from predominantly UI driven testing to more
unit testing and API testing.
For how long Microsoft will support?
Coded UI test in Visual Studio
2019 will continue to be supported for any issues that may arise during the
support lifecycle of the product. As outlined in the product lifecycle and servicing documentation, you can
continue to use Coded UI and will be fully supported for the next 5 years and
an additional 5 years of extended support is also available should you need it.
But this is limited to specific bug fixes, no new features will be added.
Will the test team able to maintain existing scripts?
Different Visual Studio versions
can be installed side by side. This means that developers will be able to
continue to use Visual Studio 2019 to maintain any existing Coded UI test
assets, while being able to use any new Visual Studio versions when they
becomes available in the future for other development needs.
What about the CI/CD pipeline in Azure DevOps?
The same side-by-side installation
mechanism mentioned in above point, allows for CI/CD pipelines to keep running
smoothly without any interruptions while you migrate. This is because when
Coded UI tests run as part of a CI/CD pipeline in Azure DevOps, tests are run
against a particular Visual Studio version installed on the agent or a
particular version of test platform. We will continue to support running tests
against Visual Studio 2019 or its associated test platform in newer versions of
Azure DevOps until the support life cycle of Visual Studio 2019 ends.
Recommendation from Microsoft for migration
Microsoft recommend that any new
test collateral being built should use the alternatives and plan your
replacement of older Coded UI tests so that it is completed before the end of
the Visual Studio support lifecycle. As part of this process it is recommend
that customer re-evaluate their test portfolio to remove tests that are
no-longer useful.
They recommend using Selenium for testing web
apps and Appium with
WinAppDriver for testing desktop and UWP apps. Consider Xamarin.UITest for
testing iOS and Android apps using the NUnit test framework.
References:
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/devops/changes-to-coded-ui-test-in-visual-studio-2019/
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