Editing Test automation (section)

===Graphical user interface (GUI) testing ===
{{main article|Graphical user interface testing}}

Many test automation tools provide record and playback features that allow users to interactively record user actions and replay them back any number of times, comparing actual results to those expected. The advantage of this approach is that it requires little or no [[software development]]. This approach can be applied to any application that has a [[graphical user interface]]. However, reliance on these features poses major reliability and maintainability problems. Relabelling a button or moving it to another part of the window may require the test to be re-recorded. Record and playback also often adds irrelevant activities or incorrectly records some activities.{{Citation needed|date=March 2013}}

A variation on this type of tool is for testing of web sites. Here, the "interface" is the web page. However, such a framework utilizes entirely different techniques because it is rendering [[HTML]] and listening to [[DOM Events]] instead of operating system events. [[Headless browser]]s or solutions based on [[Selenium (Software)#Selenium WebDriver|Selenium Web Driver]] are normally used for this purpose.<ref>Headless Testing with Browsers; https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/gui-and-headless-browsers/</ref><ref name="Headless Testing with Browsers">Headless Testing with PhantomJS;http://phantomjs.org/headless-testing.html</ref><ref>Automated User Interface Testing; https://www.devbridge.com/articles/automated-user-interface-testing/</ref>

Another variation of this type of test automation tool is for testing mobile applications. This is very useful given the number of different sizes, resolutions, and operating systems used on mobile phones. For this variation, a framework is used in order to instantiate actions on the mobile device and to gather results of the actions.

Another variation is script-less test automation that does not use record and playback, but instead builds a model{{clarify|date=June 2016}} of the application and then enables the tester to create test cases by simply inserting test parameters and conditions, which requires no scripting skills.