How to automate QA testing of SaaS and low-code applications

Quality assurance automation engineers test applications developed in-house, from legacy monoliths to cloud-native applications that leverage microservices. A typical mission-critical application requires a combination of unit testing at the code level, code review, API tests, automated user experience testing, security testing, and performance testing. The best devops practice is to automate running these tests and then select an optimal subset for continuous testing inside CI/CD (continuous integration and continuous delivery) pipelines.

But what about applications, workflows, integrations, data visualizations, and user experiences configured using SaaS (software-as-a-service) platforms, low-code development tools, or no-code platforms that empower citizen developers? Just because there’s less or no coding involved, does that automatically imply that workflows function as required, data processing meets the business requirements, security configurations align with company policies, and performance meets user expectations?

So, what should be tested? How can these apps be tested without access to the underlying source code? Where should IT prioritize testing, especially considering many devops organizations are understaffed in QA engineers? 

Start by defining and implementing agile acceptance testing

Low-code and no-code require testing the business logic

Use low-code testing platforms and machine learning

That’s a high bar for deployment frequency and testing practices and what you hope other SaaS and low-code platforms target. This level of testing, complemented with the development team’s test automation efforts, helps reduce deployment risks, especially for applications requiring high reliability.

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