wdi5 is seeing increased adoption as the designated end-to-end test tool for UI5. With its’ support for both UI5 Control- and Webcomponent-APIs and its’ locator compatibility with OPA5, UI5 developers quickly feel at home in “their” turf.
As it is with many developer tools, the ecosystem around the tool is at least equally important as the tool itself. By having a straight, short and quick path to using wdi5 and an obstacle-free road back with nice test result baggage, wdi5 will get more useful in the greater test lifecycle of things.
Here’s a look at what’s in place and what’s brewing in the wdi5 ecosystem.
Design Time
With a guided install cli and a quick npm init-based bootstrap, wdi5 can be added quickly to any UI5 app. The documentation site is constantly updated, including a dedicated recipes section. Rumor has it that tutorials over at developers.sap.com are in the making 🙂
No rumor but recently initiated effort is the cooperation with the fine people around Adrian Marten to put wdi5 into the unofficial UI5 test recorder Add-On for Google Chrome. With it, a click-/usage-path through a UI5 app can be recorded and subsequently exported as a Test Journey.
Just recently, wdi5 support came to the official UI5 test recorder (yes, we adhere to the overall confusion effort of SAP when it comes to naming) with UI5 version 105. Call up https://ui5.sap.com/1.105.0/ and hit »⌃ control + ⇧ shift + alt / ⌥ option + T« yourself.
Silently cooking in the digital void is a Jira add-on for exporting a board with epics, stories, issues and /or todos into a wdi5 test skeleton.
Runtime
To be able to interact with a deployed UI5 app, wdi5 needs authentication capabilities – most importantly BTP standard- and custom IdP support, including Universal ID. Watch the Twitter- and GitHub-sphere for announcements soon™.
Having wdi5 available in Continuous Integration environments aside from manually installing it in a pipeline will be crucial too. While nothing is underway with regards to GitHub actions or GitLab pipelines yet, rumor has it there’s something steaming in the BTP CI/CD service space.
Not only steaming, but definitely cooking is the out-of-the-box support for hooking up wdi5 to BrowserStack. Saucelabs is planned too, but we’re still waiting for an OS-account to drop from them nice people.
A little more far ahead on the horizon is to provide testing for visual differences in a UI5 app/control. While the foundation is layed out by our excellent WebdriverIO base, no R&D has been conducted yet into that direction.
Report Time
The standard “spec” reporter in wdi5 already provides a comprehensive overview of successful, flaky and failed tests. However, there for sure is room for improvement to e.g. supply more UI5-specific information in the result. It’s on the roadmap, but not yet picked up.
Like the simmering of the Jira export plugin for the Design Time, there’s a counterpart designed for posting back wdi5 test results into Jira items. This allows for keeping a tab (test history) on the functionality of the most important processes (“happy path”) of a UI5 app.
tl;dr
Design Time
🍲 install, bootstrap, recipes, test recorder locators
🧑🍳 test recording, tutorials, Jira export
🍽 stub generator
Runtime
🧑🍳 authentication (BTP, FLP, custom IdP), BrowserStack integration
🍽 BTP CI/CD, GitHub action, GtiLab pipeline, SauceLabs integration, Visual Testing
Report time
🧑🍳 Jira post-back
🍽 custom reporter
Also, always have a look at the wdi5 roadmap 🗺 for more meat to the bone and root to the veggie!
