Why No-Code Test Automation Has the Best ROI

When businesses calculate their ROI, they usually compare the time it takes to manually test a case against the time it takes to automate the same case. While this is useful information, it doesn’t show the full picture.

It’s important to consider the time it takes to implement, the maintenance work needed, and the time required to analyze why a test has failed. All of these have costs and impact the overall productivity of your team and business. 

Related reading: What businesses miss when measuring the ROI of test automation

Since build and maintenance costs of test automation are often left out of an ROI calculation, this can lead to unmet expectations on automation projects. As a result, they fail. This has caused businesses to search for new approaches to test automation that keeps build times and maintenance to a minimum. 

Enter no-code test automation. 

No-code test automation is a testing solution that enables businesses to sharpen their competitive edge, reduce risk, and improve the quality of their applications and software. 

In this post, we’ll explain what no-code test automation is, how it works in the case of Leapwork, and why no-code has the best ROI. 

What is no-code test automation?

No-code (also referred to as codeless or scriptless) test automation requires no coding skills to develop a test case. It exists to make the onboarding, build time, and maintenance of automation as simple as possible, while still being able to automate complex test scenarios. 

Related reading: Why should I use scriptless test automation if I can code? 

How no-code test automation works (Leapwork example)

Rather than using lines of code to build automated test cases, no-code test automation with Leapwork uses a different technique. We remove unnecessary complexity and visualize text cases with a universal language that anyone can understand: flow charts.

The user only sees the most necessary actions - they can even create sub-flows to package larger elements of a test case- and testers can get a better overview of steps and detect if a change should be made to a test. 

In the video above there is an example of how no-code and code-based automation work. It shows the functional testing of a website to verify that mandatory fields on a form are working as they should, with a codeless test being built on the left (using Leapwork) and a script-based test (using Selenium) on the right. 

Why Leapwork’s no-code test automation has the best ROI

As we established in the introduction, the implementation, build and maintenance times associated with traditional approaches to test automation (like Selenium) often outweigh the benefit of using test automation in the first place. With tools like Leapwork, the time spent on building and maintaining can be limited drastically. 

Leapwork’s no code test automation enables teams to: 

• Match the pace of the development cycle with easier to build automation
• Keep maintenance to a minimum for greater productivity and test coverage
• Free up resources for value-generating tasks like exploratory testing. Testers don't have to learn how to code, or write code, and developers don’t have to work on automation for functional testing
• Improve the adoption of automation, and makes collaboration like bug reporting between teams much smoother due to our visual language and video logs of test cases
• Streamline reporting with automated dashboards providing overviews of every test cycle. This gives room to embrace more testing with a broader and deeper scope
• Extend the scope of test automation, as it’s easy to scale and can work across platforms, as opposed to e.g. code-based Selenium
• Speed up the release pipeline and support CI/CD by allowing much more efficient testing

Want to learn more about calculating the ROI of test automation? We’ve created a short guide, listing what you should consider as part of your ROI calculation.