In a previous article, “5 Quality Engineering Challenges Slowing Down Enterprise Delivery”, Noesis explored five key challenges affecting enterprise QA and DevOps teams, including the growing dependency on technical specialists to create and maintain automated tests.
This raises an important question: who within an enterprise team can actually automate tests? For years, test automation has been closely tied to programming skills and technical expertise. However, the rise of low-code and no-code platforms is changing this reality. Today, QA professionals, business teams, product owners, and functional analysts can all play a more active role in test automation.
In this article, we explore why this shift matters, how bringing business knowledge closer to testing can improve test coverage, and how testingON 360 makes test automation accessible to a wider range of professionals.
Why Automation Used to Require a Developer
For years, automating a test meant knowing how to write one. Selenium, Java, Python, or a custom framework built in-house were simply part of the job, along with technical syntax, version control, and constant script maintenance. Contributing to test automation therefore required solid programming skills. Anyone without that background wasn't excluded on purpose. They were excluded by the tooling itself.
In large teams, that quickly became a familiar bottleneck. Someone on the business side identifies a scenario that genuinely needs to be tested: a compliance rule, a payment flow, or a client-specific process. They know the requirement, understand the expected behavior, and often have the clearest view of what could go wrong. But turning that knowledge into an automated test still requires someone who can translate it into code. So, the request goes into the queue, waiting for an automation engineer to have the time to pick it up.
Multiply this across dozens of features and several releases per sprint, and the problem becomes harder to ignore. Development keeps moving, while automation has to wait for the people with the technical skills to build and maintain it. It's not a question of teams failing to keep up. The tooling itself creates a dependency that makes scaling automation harder than it needs to be.
What Happens When the Wrong Person Writes the Test?
When the responsibility for creating a test is transferred from someone who understands the business requirement to someone who has to translate it into code, critical context can get lost along the way.
Take a compliance rule with five exceptions. The person on the business side who owns that rule knows all five without thinking about it. The automation engineer translating it into a script only knows what made it into the ticket, and tickets rarely capture every exception, every edge case, or every "except when."
The result may be a perfectly valid test for the rule as it was described, but not for the rule as it actually works. That difference might not cause a problem today. Months later, however, a real case can expose something the test suite was never designed to catch.
The solution isn't simply to write better tickets. It's to remove the handoff. When the person who knows the rule can build the test directly, there's no translation step for those exceptions to get lost in.
The Market Is Already Removing That Handoff
Low-code and no-code adoption is already well established across large organizations. Test automation is moving in the same direction, giving rise to citizen developers: professionals without formal programming backgrounds who use accessible development tools to create and manage applications, workflows, and automated processes.
Even vendors traditionally associated with scripted automation are embracing this shift. Tricentis has published guidance on codeless test automation, while Katalon has explored the growing range of codeless testing tools.
The message is becoming increasingly clear: test automation is no longer something that has to remain exclusively in the hands of people who code. The people who understand the business processes behind the tests can now play a more active role in creating and managing them.
How testingON 360 Removes the Barriers to Test Automation
testingON 360 is built on exactly this principle: automating a test shouldn't require knowing how to code.
The platform makes test automation more accessible through several capabilities:
- No-code by design: Tests are built through a visual, intuitive interface, with no scripting involved;
- Simplified test specification: Each test is specified in language close to the business process itself, rather than technical syntax, bringing the person creating the test closer to the person who understands the application;
- Faster creation and maintenance: Without scripts to write and maintain line by line, the time between identifying a scenario worth testing and having it automated and running is significantly reduced;
- Open to any team: QA professionals, business teams, product owners, and functional analysts can all contribute directly to test coverage, instead of routing every scenario through a central technical team.
This no-code approach is supported by the technical depth that specialist teams expect. testingON 360 can generate test scenarios and code across multiple programming platforms, taking a test from a manual specification to an automated workflow without requiring the person creating it to write the code themselves.
The platform can then execute tests at scale across different environments and platforms, using intelligent orchestration to manage the process. Its AI-powered self-healing capabilities can also adapt tests as applications change, helping reduce the maintenance effort required.
So, Can Anyone Automate Tests?
Here's the direct answer: QA professionals, business teams, product owners, and functional analysts can now automate the everyday scenarios that make up most test suites, including user flows, business rules, and compliance checks. These are precisely the scenarios they often understand better than anyone else.
Some areas still require specialist expertise. Complex integrations, performance testing, and test architecture all demand a level of engineering knowledge that no interface can replace, and that isn't changing.
The difference is that this work no longer has to share the same queue with every other test in the suite. When everyday scenarios can be handled by the people who understand them best, specialists can focus their time on the problems that genuinely require their expertise.
The result is test automation that is more distributed, easier to scale, and less dependent on a small group of specialists for every test. The ability to contribute to test automation is no longer limited to those who can write code.
With testingON 360, organizations can bring QA, business, and product teams closer to the testing process, making quality a shared responsibility across the software delivery lifecycle.
Check out the full blogpost here.
