As a QA team within our Product Innovation department, we understand the need for efficient, reliable ways to test applications that are built to last forever. Quality is an essential pillar of our brand promise; we want you to trust our technology and enable you to develop your functionality 10X faster.
See this old blog for some background reading on our role:
We place a strong emphasis on end-to-end, user-focused testing—a shift-right approach—because it provides the level of confidence that we need to say we're delivering a quality product. For a system as complex as ours, investing in test automation is essential. It allows us to rely on consistent, repeatable checks, so that any manual testing efforts can be focused on where they’re most valuable: ensuring that new features and ongoing development meet our quality standards.
Since we are shipping a low-code Platform -with which all of you build amazing Applications-
quality is a shared responsibility. Both the quality of the Platform and your Application needs to be top-notch to serve your End Users. The Platform supports quality development by various means: Branching & Merging capabilities, Code reviews, Unit tests, Smoke tests and a zero-Validations policy should already be part of your standard practices. With this in mind, we are pleased to announce that today, we’re releasing the alpha version of Testwise, our internal UI test support library, now available on NPM!
What is Testwise?
Testwise is a Playwright-specific support library for end-to-end test automation solutions, geared towards the testing of applications built on the Thinkwise Platform. More specifically: to support and increase velocity on test automation efforts in the Universal/Indicium space.
We’ve relied on similar tooling internally for years—taking the time required to develop useful functions that increase productivity. Now, we’re making it available to the broader community.
Since many of our clients work with similar building blocks in the Software Factory and the Universal UI —shared Screen components like the Action bar and the Grid components, common UI patterns such as DOM structures, and workflows such as login—we are developing a library of common components and helpers, and in centralizing these efforts, we aim to speed up test creation and reduce overhead on maintenance.
If you commit to utilizing our common components and helpers, we can ensure that your tests won’t break when Universal GUI logic is changed as we will maintain the solution in parallel with changes coming from our colleagues. This is going to save you a ton of maintenance in the future, believe us!
Why now?
With the intention of replacing the Windows GUI with the Universal UI, now is a good time to shift gears in the quality space as well.
The Windows GUI-based Process tests won’t be replaced with native End-2-End test tooling, instead we recommend using market-leading external tooling like Playwright for the Universal UI.
Testwise is still in the early stages of development and not yet finished product. With the basic structure in place, we're now starting to bring over key functionality to help enhance users' workflows and support their quality efforts.
We've made steady progress by evaluating several tools through internal benchmarking and discussion. As a result, we've transitioned away from linear Cypress tests in favor of technologies that better align with our quality goals such as Playwright and TypeScript. Other internal changes have also been taking place, for example, the incorporation of patterns such as AAA and POM/COM to help improve maintainability in our test solutions, a focus that extends into the Testwise library architecture.
By releasing Testwise in its current form, we’re hoping to:
- Lower the barrier to Test Automation on Thinkwise-based solutions
- Make it easier for the Community to maintain consistent Application quality
- Gather feedback from real-world usage
- Invite contributions that help improve and expand the library
A starting point
This is the first step. At the moment, only a few common components, like Action bar, Grid, Form, Export and popup screens, and helpers such as login, user simulation and deeplinking are included. We’ll gradually expand these with more common components and helpers.
And since your applications are already model-driven, we’re exploring ways to generate test artifacts (e.g., Page Object Model structures) directly from those Software Factory models. This would make it easier to get started with test automation and help keep your tests in sync with your application.
Whether you're just starting to implement automated testing or looking to improve your existing strategy, we hope Testwise provides a useful foundation.
We invite you to:
- Try it out
- Share your feedback
- Assist in guiding the project direction
Looking ahead
Testwise is part of our broader approach to quality—one that values automation, collaboration, and continuous improvement. We know that testing isn't just a QA task; it's something everyone involved in building software contributes to. That’s why we’re investing in tools like this.
For those adopting this tool, we hope it’s just the first step toward seamless, reliable test solutions integrated into your CI/CD pipelines—helping you deliver quality products with confidence.
During the coming months we’ll write multiple blogs and more elaborate Documentation to get you up to speed. Thank you for being part of the journey. We’re excited to see where it leads.
The first follow-up is already here!