Coded UI tests (CUITs) drive the application through its user interface (UI). These tests include functional testing of the UI controls. They help us to verify that the whole application, including its user interface, is functioning correctly. Coded UI tests are 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.
Most of us are aware that Coded UI Test for automated UI-driven functional testing is deprecated. Visual Studio 2019 is the last version where Coded UI Test will be fully available.
Microsoft decided to deprecate Coded UI because the 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.
Alternative to Coded UI Test, Microsoft recommended Selenium for testing web applications and Appium with WinAppDriver for testing desktop (UWP, WPF, WinForms, Win32) and UWP apps. For testing Dynamics 365 Customer engagement products, Microsoft recommended using the EasyRepro framework that is built on top of Selenium. For Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations, a Selenium-based regression suite automation tool is recommended. Consider Xamarin.UITest for testing iOS and Android apps using the NUnit test framework.
You may have some questions like what will happen when the team continues to use the existing framework with Coded UI? as per Microsoft Product Life Cycle policy, they allow customers to continue using the existing products for 10 years. 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 become available in the future for other development needs. Microsoft will continue to support running tests against Visual Studio 2019 or its associated test platform in newer versions of Azure DevOps Server (formerly, TFS) until the support life cycle of Visual Studio 2019 ends. To reduce the impact on users some minimum support will still be available in Visual Studio 2022 Preview 4 or later version.
Migrating Coded UI Test, Microsoft doesn’t provide any migration tool for transition from Coded UI to selenium/WinAppDriver/third-party tools. Therefore, if the team plans to migrate then migration should be planned after following standards and structure supported by other tools or libraries.
Thanks for reading the article and you got some idea on Coded UI Test deprecation and next actions.
Reference: Microsoft.
make it perfect!
journey of quality 
Leave a Reply