Automated UITesting is a common strategy for smoke testing and regression testing of legacy Windows applications. Especially in combination with Azure DevOps-powered CI/CD(Continuous Integration/Deployment). Such applications are still widely used by many enterprises and businesses across the globe. Unfortunately, the mobile revolution hasn't been able to dethrone the PC, and Microsoft is still strong in the "Office" department.

The problem is that sometimes you have the source code of Windows applications critical to your business's survival, and other times you don't have it. In such cases, the only option is to perform the application's functional testing through the UI. But, it is an ordinary task, and you might need a tonne of the workforce. In such cases, UItest automation comes in handy.

Note:The course also covers YAMLPipelines on Azure DevOps too.

There are several options available for UItest automation, Microsoft itself offered Coded UI in the past, but it is now deprecated. Right now, Microsoft is supporting Windows Application Driver or WinAppDriver, a.k.a WAD, for UI automation of Windows applications. You must be wondering where Azure is? Well, Azure DevOps will fit into this picture later; relax. WinAppDriver is based on Appium, an open-source API conforming to the WebDriver standard. Microsoft WinAppDriver is not open source, but it still has a GitHub repository for documentation.

Azure DevOps is the cloud-based offspring of TFS(TeamFoundation Server). It continues the legacy of Microsoft's once-on-premise Application Lifecycle Management(ALM) solution. During test development, the automation tests are being written by software test engineers who, in many cases, need Visual Studio licenses for many things. Unfortunately, these people are also highly paid, and after developing tests, it's not wise to keep them running test automation scripts on their machines through Visual Studio. In such cases, a low-cost solution is needed where non-code savvy people can also run UI automation tests through a standard tool like Azure DevOps.

Azure DevOps lets you create a complete infrastructure to support such scenarios. How? That's what this course is all about. I'll show you how to set up Virtual Machines to run unattended WinAppDriver and C# based UItest automation through Azure DevOps. I'll also show you how to set up things on Azure DevOps by creating organizations and projects. Finally, the course also shows you how to generate an Azure PAT(Personal Access Token) for security purposes and configure it to minimize its side effects.

Azure lets us store code in more than one type of source code repository. The classic one is TFVC which is covered in this course first. Secondly, we have Azure Repos Git. Finally, a Pipeline is a set of tasks that will run the test automation. The UI for TFVC and Git-based pipelines are different; both are explained in this course. Git repositories generate a YAML-based build pipeline. Build channels communicate with an Azure DevOps build agent installed on a machine and configured to work with a specific Azure DevOps organization through a PAT.

There's an article about how to run WinAppDriver through Azure DevOps Pipelines, but it is unclear and doesn't cover all the parts. So I'm going step by step in this course from start to finish. Everything from installing tools on a test VMand creating an Azure account up to installing devices on developer machines, creating Azure DevOps repositories, and Azure DevOps Pipelines is covered. Special attention is paid to the topics of interest for software testers, such as viewing test run reports.

Various options of Azure DevOps Test Run reports are explained to you. Supplementary topics like running a PowerShell task to start/stop Windows Application Driver in the build pipeline are also shown.

Please note that Azure DevOps is a highly in-demand skill right now. Microsoft is heavily investing in Azure and achieving major successes in this department. If you want to prepare for the future, just learn everything you can about Azure, including Azure DevOps and CI /CD.

Of course, other critical Azure features like Azure Boards are not covered in this course. I can cover more details in the future based on student demand. It is possible for a user to create bugs and link work items like stories/tasks to the Azure DevOps builds and failures.

It is high time that you get started in this direction and start learning more with practical courses like this one. Learn more about CI and CD, and learn more about Microsoft Azure DevOps and source control repositories like Azure Git.