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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