What is a faster alternative to maintaining an automation testing suite using codeception & php?

Question

We have been using Codeception/PHP for the past year and have had problems in making progress fast enough (automated coverage is very low). We have realized that hand coding PHP is something we want to avoid and utilize some sort of screen recording to generate the tests. I agree that hand coding allows the most control however for this particular organization we need automate coverage ASAP.

I looked at some screen recorders based SAAS services but the pricing models are a bit extreme for us. I also looked at Silked Webdriver and I thought maybe we can use that to generate some of the hand-coding selector stuff. I also looked at testim.io and Katalon and while they look good, I was not sure if someone else has a better solution that they had a good experience with.

Again hand coding is great but maintaining a QA framework where we are hand coding everything is not feasible as we do not have enough QA to keep up with new development. By the way, our application is Lawyer Analytix and is PHP based.

Answer 1

I don't believe recorders will be faster in the short, nor the long run. Recorded tests need to be re-recorded, are harder to debug. Unless it is easier to get a lot of non-technical people who can continuously update the recorded test-suite.

Faster would be writing test scripts and letting people in low costs countries run the scripts daily until you have automated them.

we do not have enough QA to keep up with new development

• Start with developers adding test automation for all new features!
• Create a backlog of missing test automation. Missing tests is technical-debt of the development team.
• Get business owners to understand this is a whole team issue, not just QA.
• Get teams to work on the missing test backlog as well.

Developers can and should code tests, it is pretty common these days. I would even argue that it is the norm in modern software development.