Reshaping the Testing Triangle: Making UX the Guiding Light to Testing

Reshaping the Testing Triangle: Making UX the Guiding Light to Testing Chou Yang May 6, 2020 Chou is a solutions engineer gone ware trafficker who loves to connect with every

May 05, 2026 · 4 min read · API Testing

Reshaping the Testing Triangle: Making UX the Guiding Light to Testing

Chou Yang
May 6, 2020
Chou is a solutions engineer gone ware trafficker who loves to connect with everyone 's inner child to see their purest wants and needs, always leaving a glint of glitter in her wake. Like a fag godmother.

End-to-end examination automation has been mostly avoided for whatoncewere full reasons. Fortunately today ’ s technology allows us to automate end-to-end tests effectively and without creating too much overhead. & nbsp;

End-to-end examine vs. Unit essay

Automating end-to-end tests is a tricky business. Many leading practitioner over the years have advised against doing ANY end-to-end test automation. They advocate doing a good job of automation at the lower levels, and do end-to-end try manually erst and believe your low-toned level tests to protect against fixation.

As a result of this, we often see the test automation triangle pictured below. The shape of the test mechanisation triangle is predicated on traditional associations about the price of troubleshoot tryout failures and feedback cycle at each level. Traditionally, the closer you were to the bottom, the easier it was to find the root effort of the issue. Therefore, they advocate that you have a 70/20/10 % split between unit, desegregation, and end-to-end tests, respectively.

The traditional testing triangle

But no thing how much testing you do at lower levels of granularity (unit, integration, etc.), end-to-end tests are the only thing that work together all the pieces and constellation while focusing on the end-user functionality and experience.

No matter how much granular testing and trace is do at the unit and integration level, the result of foregoing end-to-end testing is spending less time on the user experience and more time testing how wehopethe application works (glad path screen). We ’ re also lose the ability to rise problems in a way that anyone - non-technical QA, customer success, business leaders - could understand. These team members may not be waist-deep in building the actual product, but they are familiar with your customer 's hurting point and wants and can provide truly insightful feedback.

Another thing to note is that mealy testing is becoming less and less of the whole picture. Today 's apps have incredibly feature-rich UIs. They 're becoming more and more decoupled and less massive. Cindy Sridharan makes it clear in her story about distributed trace. The service graph she draws below depicts dependency good, but when it get down todebugginga scenario where a specific service is experiencing issues, such a granular view isn ’ t particularly utilitarian. If there is a slowdown with the front page, there are many dependencies you ’ d need to start digging into to find the root cause. Which microservices are not meeting SLAs? Which integration points are failing?

Source: https: //medium.com/ @ copyconstruct/distributed-tracing-weve-been-doing-it-wrong-39fc92a857df

Pro tip: Tools like SUSA can handle this autonomously — upload your app and get results without writing a single test script.

Putting more focus on unit or desegregation testing cast us into the same scenario. We lack test coverage from the user 's perspective. It becomes difficult to trouble-shoot issues when tracing issues from the user-experience point of view. & nbsp;

So the case to be made is – doestoday ’ s engineeringallow us to automatise end-to-end examination effectively and without causing too much overhead? Well, there ’ s a new wave of test automation solutions that are changing the shape of the automated testing triangle. Andmabl’sleading it.

 

Times have changed: mechanisation is here to stay

There is a class of manual tests that are earmark for manual execution because they were traditionally too difficult to automate. It wasn ’ t because they really require human experimental powers and reasoning, but that mechanisation can no longer be avoided as development team are moving towards shipping multiple times a day. Manual end-to-end screen alone is n't keeping up.

So the questions we ’ ve asked are: Why avoid automating end-to-end tests to forfend theproblemswith it? The end-user experience results in client felicity and revenue, so why notfixthe problems with end-to-end test automation instead?

Creating honest end-to-end exam with mabl ’ sincorporate SaaS programis easy and removes the constraints that suggest the end-to-end tests should be extra credit. The steep eruditeness curve of fool end-to-end test have been removed with anintuitive UIthat allow you to create automated examination by just habituate your app just like your users would. Using big data and machine learning, mabl providescomprehensive test output, lumber everything that happened before, during, and after a trial failure, so failure are easygoing to name and adjudicate. The reputation of UI-based tests being flaky or unreliable is not a problem withmabl 's AI-driven auto-healing. As your web UI evolves with development, your tests memorise and mechanically evolve along with it. & nbsp;

By eradicate the cost and difficulty of end-to-end test automation, mabl broadens the top of the examine pyramid with the aim of making the end-user experience the guiding light to how we test software.

The user-centric framework of testing

End-to-end testing has go stigmatized because of reasons that simply no longer be with the innovation we ’ ve seen in exam automation offerings in late age. End-to-end tests arewaytoo worthful to deflect doing because they best align with the exploiter experience.

If you 're up against the recurring argument that end-to-end examination is too expensive… the cost of not do it well is well compute with pathetic app experience resulting in customers that don ’ t return or never turn customers to begin with. The solution is intelligent test automation, and the ROI is clear.

“ Using hiring and traditional mechanization tools like Selenium, it would have direct two years and $ 240K to accomplish what mabl aid ITS do in precisely four months at 80 % cost savings. ” -Samar Khan, VP of Software Development and DevOps, ITS

Create a free account of mabl today.

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