User Interface testing, also known as UI testing or GUI testing, tests the application’s visual elements to validate proper functionality and expected performance. It ensures that UI functions and application components have no defects, such as icons, radio buttons, text boxes, toolbars, color, fonts, checkboxes, windows, and menus. The primary aspects of UI testing are functionality, performance, usability, compliance, and visual design of the software application to make sure the application works successfully and satisfactorily.
UI testing checks how the application handles user actions using input devices like keyboard and mouse and whether the visual elements are working and displayed correctly. In addition, it ensures the efficient and accurate performance of the software application’s UI so that end-users adopt it quickly and successfully.
A faulty UI does not meet user expectations. It is the only way to interact with users, and malfunctioning UI may damage the brand or product adoption. Therefore, it is vital for organizations developing software applications to carry out UI testing before releasing it to production.
UI testing has different types based on various functional and non-functional testing strategies meeting specific standards of user interface testing. Some examples of software testing methodologies are:
The GUI testing has different approaches:
It creates graphical models describing systems’ behavior. It generates highly efficient test cases to understand the system performance in detail. The model-based testing follows steps discussed below:
The user interface testing generally focuses on the functionality and performance of the application’s graphical user interface. First, commonly occurring UI defects should be tested and improved, such as button alignment issues, incomplete fields, resizing issues, overlapping of fields, browsing issues, inconsistent space between textboxes or labels, misaligned data pages, and so forth. Then a more profound performance and visual experience of the user interface is checked to ensure the expected performance of the application.
Other than ensuring accurate working of the application’s UI, UI testing offers various benefits, as discussed below:
Though there is no ideal user interface testing method available, some of the best practices for UI testing are as follows:
UI component functionality and its design are multi-faceted. It needs attention to detail, good judgment, and defined scopes. For example, a tester should have a checklist to ensure all aspects of the frontend interface are covered in the testing, such as fonts, color schemes, hyperlinks, Ui components, alignment, content, and expected behavior of the UI.
UI testing is carried out using automated tools and frameworks. UI testing tools are Selenium, QTP, Ranorex, and Cucumber. Whereas, Ui testing framework examples include Serenity, Robot Framework, Cypress, TestProject.io, Sahi, and so forth.
Conclusively, UI testing has become crucial for today’s software development, and thus one needs to follow specific guidelines while carrying out UI testing. The article has covered all the essential points necessary to start UI testing successfully.