The goals of this library are:
- Make tests easier to write. Writing an ai() step is equivalent to describing the action (“Fill out the form with realistic values”), assertion (“Verify there are no errors displayed on the page”), or extraction (“What is the shopping cart total?”) in plain English. The AI does the rest. There’s no need to write selectors, or add data-test-id attributes all over your app so that your tests have stable locators. Our website and GitHub repo show several examples of tricky testing scenarios that are made easy with ZeroStep.
- Make tests less frustrating to maintain. Unlike selectors, ZeroStep ai() steps are not tightly coupled to your app’s markup. The ZeroStep AI interprets your ai() steps at runtime which means even large scale changes in the app won’t break your tests, so long as your functional requirements remain unchanged. Selectors, in my opinion, are one of the worst leaky abstractions in software development. I can’t imagine how many dev hours have been lost due to them. We’re happy to not use any concept of selectors with this approach.
- Keep it simple - ai() steps have no predefined syntax (unlike Cucumber). You just need to be able to clearly describe what action, assertion, or extraction you want the AI to perform.