Disclaimer: This is a quick brain dump, in order to have this thoughts stored somewhere to not having to retype this everytime I’m involved in a discussion about the topic. I might develop this into a full blog post one day.
Nevertheless, happy to hear your opinions on the topic.
These promises of codeless record & playback tools are around for 20+ years.
Imho, there two (or three) possibilities:
- You code the stuff yourself, using a real programming language + frameworks/ tools. Imho the most powerful option, but of course also the most to learn/ master. This basically is programming.
- You abstract all the complicated stuff away, to an extreme that also non technical people understand it, but you loose most of the power and possibilities of 1.
- You hide the complicated stuff behind a fancy UI, that looks shiny and easy to use in their demos, but if you want to do something that goes beyond the happy path, you still need to know & understand programming concepts. So although these tools are marketed at non-coders, the target group cannot reach the full potential of the tools.
Just my 2 cents.
Update 2021-10-05: Bas Dijkstra has written a blog post on the same topic, which is totally expressing my thoughts and believes on the topic, so I can fully recommend it to my dear readers: On codeless automation (or rather on abstraction layers)