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Dissertação apresentada à Escola Superior de Tecnologia do Instituto Politécnico de Castelo Branco, para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Desenvolvimento de Software e Sistemas Interativos

Dissertação apresentada à Escola Superior de Tecnologia do Instituto Politécnico de Castelo Branco para cumprimento dos requisitos necessários à obtenção do grau de Mestre em Desenvolvimento de Software e Sistemas Interativos.

Low-code development platforms are designed to accelerate software development with a minimum of hand coding. They have allowed professionals with distinct backgrounds to become software developers. This brings more professionals to IT areas, reskilling some of them from different areas of knowledge but, at the same time, it has also brought to the software development area many professionals without a strong background in this area. Although testing should be performed in all applications, regardless of the programming language or the platform used, this reinforces the need for testing low-code developed applications. In this work, we study the test automation process on the OutSystems low-code development platform. The focus is on Unit, Integration/API and System/End-to-End testing levels. Examples illustrate that the implementation of best practices during the development process can have a significant influence on the test automation process. However, it is important to know whether the workload associated with the implementation of the best practices can undermine the benefits of using a low-code platform and it is important to consider that not all test automation tools have the same behavior.

Implementing best practices during the software development process can significantly influence the test automation process. This is true in all software applications, regardless of the platform or the programming language used, but it is even more important when the software is developed using low-code development platforms. These platforms are commonly used together with agile methodologies, and they are designed to accelerate software development with a minimum of hand-coding. Generally, when using these platforms and methodologies, the focus is on verbal and informal communication rather than documentation. The focus is on getting high-quality source code, adequate test sets, and greater interaction with the end customer. This highlights the need to use best practices in software development to achieve better quality software and facilitate the test automation process. In this work, we analyse the test automation on low-code development platforms and, more specifically, how the best practices for OutSystems development influence the test automation process. A survey on the opinion and practice of OutSystems platform professionals, 27 respondents, is also analysed and discussed. The goal is to understand how they recognise the influence that best development practices have on the testing automation process and how they apply these best practices in their daily activities.