We spoke with Razmik Seysyan, Senior Software Developer at JetBrains and project lead for JetBrains Aqua, about their new powerful IDE for test automation.

devmio: Could you please briefly introduce yourself to our readers? What brought you to JetBrains, and what do you do there?

Razmik Seysyan: I'm a software engineer, and I’ve been working at JetBrains for seven years. Currently, I lead the development of IDE-based tools for test automation specialists.

devmio: What distinguishes Aqua from other IDEs/testing environments?

Razmik Seysyan: Aqua is a fully-featured, powerful IDE that provides the best experience for developing and managing automated tests. Aqua allows test engineers to work with multiple languages, manage data in databases, run docker images, capture elements for UI tests, generate code, and much more — all with a single tool.

It has yet to be fully released, but the preview is available for everyone to try. Most of Aqua’s capabilities are also available for other commercial JetBrains IDEs with the Aqua Plugin.

devmio: Do you think testing is a topic that developers would rather avoid?

Razmik Seysyan: It's hard to judge, and it all depends on the software engineering culture in a given team. I'd say developers tend to avoid investing too much time into developing tests.

Aqua helps develop automated UI tests that interact with the application's interface and simulate user behaviour — the most complicated and time-consuming type of testing.

devmio: How does Aqua use automation to help developers? What kind of tests can it automate?

Razmik Seysyan: Aqua helps develop automated UI tests that interact with the application's interface and simulate user behaviour — the most complicated and time-consuming type of testing. It also helps with testing and verifying web API, preparing test data in a database, and much more.

It supports multiple unit-testing frameworks, which is standard for JetBrains IDEs.

devmio: What are the benefits of automated testing, and are they any downsides that developers should potentially compensate for?

Razmik Seysyan: We’re comparing automated testing with manual testing, correct?

As soon as the application is stable enough, automated tests become beneficial, as they can run day and night, as frequently as needed, to verify every little change in the code. Automated tests help shorten the time between when the issue is introduced in the code and when it is caught by QA.

In some cases, the maintenance cost for adjusting existing automated tests to the changes in the app is high, and that’s where tools can help most.

devmio: What does it mean for Aqua to be "intelligent and content-aware?"

Razmik Seysyan: Aqua uses data and knowledge from different sources to provide the best possible experience. For instance, Aqua analyses the web page's structure with the embedded Web Inspector and uses that data in code completion for CSS locators, suggesting unique locators of the existing web elements.

Aqua will definitely support more UI automation frameworks and assist more with generating code in the future.

devmio: What is Web Inspector, and how does it work?

Razmik Seysyan: Web Inspector is the embedded browser engine that can open a tested application page, analyse its structure, and generate CSS and XPath locators. It can also evaluate the existing locators from the test's source code to see whether the locator is still valid and points to the required elements.

devmio: Aqua already supports some of the most popular languages used for testing (Java, Kotlin, JavaScript, Python, and TypeScript). Will it, however, add support for other languages such as C# or Rust?

Razmik Seysyan: The languages we’ve chosen to support are the most popular among test automation engineers.

devmio: Can you tell us anything else about Aqua's future plans? What are the next steps in development?

Razmik Seysyan: Aqua was recently introduced, and we have already received a lot of feedback and requests from our first adopters. That peer-to-peer connection with our customers is what distinguishes JetBrains from other companies. We’ll analyse the input and adjust our next steps based on that. Aqua will definitely support more UI automation frameworks and assist more with generating code in the future.

If I may, I’d love to promote our blog and Twitter account and ask your readers to follow the latest news.

• Blog: https://blog.jetbrains.com/qa/
• Twitter: @JetBrains_Aqua