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Business owners face mounting pressure to adapt and improve. To stay abreast of the rapid changes happening within the tech sector, organizations need to automate repetitive software testing to ensure software performs as promised and provides value quickly - this may involve shorter development cycle times and quicker time-to-market for agile methodologies that will ultimately contribute to shorter development cycle times and faster Time to Market results.
Manual Testing should remain an integral component of software development cycles; however, a strong automation testing strategy must also exist alongside manual tests.
This tutorial will outline the advantages and methods associated with automation testing. Let's do this thing together.
What Is Automated Testing?
Automated Testing entails performing predefined tests using tools, software and scripts in an automated fashion.
Automation testing refers to software testing methodology which automates repetitive, time-consuming and error-prone manual activities with scripted solutions for improved efficiency and performance of an application.
Testing is an integral component of software development lifecycles. Testing helps ensure the highest possible software quality; automated Testing allows testers to spend more time performing exploratory tests and analyzing results while increasing coverage within a shorter time.
As part of phase two of automated Testing, tests are run to confirm whether newly added functionalities work as intended or require modification and upgrades to remain efficient.
It is vitally important that test suites remain regularly upgraded to maximize their potential benefits and increase overall testing efficacy.
Shift Right Testing or "Testing in Production", performed once software has been deployed into production environments, is commonly employed by many firms during this phase of software development.
Shift Right Testing serves to verify performance, stability and usability issues related to production environments.
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Why Automated Testing?
Let's examine a real-world example to highlight why automation testing is necessary. Your software now boasts an exciting new feature you must test; your test plan is comprehensive, with 50 cases identified as potential test cases.
After performing your initial sprint testing and finding ten bugs in the following sprint, you began fixing them.
How can you be certain that fixing one bug won't have any adverse side effects on other parts of the software?
Regression tests should be run after every bug fix to test all software or run regression tests on specific modules of the software.
As more bugs or features arise in software systems, manual Testing becomes challenging - automation testing provides the ideal solution to meet this demand.
Automating areas that you have covered and tested allows you to run the full software suite whenever a bug fix or new version arrives.
Therefore, test automation strategies allow for improved software quality and coverage more quickly. Furthermore, effective test automation strategies help guarantee that applications do not contain bugs that compromise user safety.
What Test Cases Should Be Automated?
Automated Testing can be an extremely valuable asset when testing areas which need repeated checks, but can this testing method be automated to 100%? As it can be challenging to automate all test cases, we must identify which can be automated successfully.
Automation Testing can be applied in many areas:
Repeated (Regressional) Tests
They are prime candidates for automated tests as they keep increasing in number with new functionality. They become hard to maintain, and running manually becomes tedious.
Testing Complexes
Automating complex tests is often the optimal option, such as calculations that necessitate complex mathematical formulae, which are subject to human errors; automating them would ensure your software consistently produces correct results.
Smoke Tests
Smoke testing, which needs to be carried out across different environments such as Development Environments (Dev Envs), Quality Assurance Environments (QA Envs) and Production environments, is an ideal candidate for automated Testing, saving both time and resources when new environments come online - automating more tests in less time.
Data-Driven Tests
In such situations, automated Testing is a great help.
Performance Tests
Automated Testing allows you to test the software under different conditions and perform tests in a much shorter time than manual methods.
Test Automation In Different Ways
To help you better understand the different automation test approaches, we have added a section to this tutorial.
These are three approaches you should consider when performing automation testing:
- Code-Driven Testing
- Tests of Graphic User Interface
- Framework Approach
Code Driven Testing
Agile software development often employs Testing as part of its approach to development. Test cases should be run to verify if code sections meet expectations.
Code-driven Testing utilizes programming languages instead of an external testing framework to create unit tests for individual functions or components, creating any test you please without needing an extra tool. However, running and setting up these tests is more challenging, making regular performance harder to attain.
Graphical User Interface Testing
Due to the ever-increasing complexity and user interface design in modern software products, formal Testing for GUI user interfaces has seen exponential growth.
Testing can be divided into two distinct forms - functional Testing and unit testing.
Developers usually undertake unit testing. It involves an in-depth examination of every component to make sure they're performing as intended when isolated from one another.
Functional Testing determines whether all elements within an application can be usable by end users. In contrast, GUI testing can often be undertaken by analysts with greater insight into user interaction with an application.
Test Automation Framework
Frameworks are guidelines designed to aid consistency in testing procedures and the structure of tests. A framework also facilitates code reuse between test cases.
Automation testing uses four main types of frameworks:
Data-Driven Frameworks
This framework emphasizes the separation between logic and test data. Here, data serve as inputs into the logic of the test script; every data set is treated separately as an independent test case.
Test automation frameworks that are data-driven store keywords and element locators in an external file, such as an XML. Testers find data-driven frameworks easier to work with because no objects reside within these repositories - which makes creating test cases simpler.
Data-driven frameworks utilize keywords stored in data files and placed into function libraries for use by data-driven frameworks.
Keywords may be generated automatically via recording or manually written, while data files can be edited without programming knowledge by testers to make editing simpler; test data will typically be saved with each keyword for easy editing purposes.
Keyword-Driven Framework
Keyword-driven Framework is an Excel data-driven framework which uses keywords as test case logic storage tables linked together via linkages.
Each logical operation in the test app has an associated keyword which represents its action, then translated into subroutines which implement its functionality and carry out desired actions on the app.
This type of framework offers many advantages, with all operations performed using keywords. This approach makes creating and running test cases accessible even to nonprogrammers; however, its functionality is restricted only by those operations made possible with existing keywords; new keywords cannot be created as this requires programming automation skills to create them.
Modular Testing Framework (MTF)
A modular Testing Framework allows you to isolate an individual software piece for Testing. By using the same framework for multiple modules, testing only needs a single code line per module.
Framework comprises two principal elements, Test Cases and Test Suites. A Test Case object represents actions or steps which need to be accomplished, while Test Suites act as collections of Test Cases.
The Test Suite will run each Test Case by employing a Test Runner that can perform assertions based on results obtained by running individual Test Cases.
Hybrid Testing Framework
Hybrid Driven Framework is an amalgamation of a Data-Driven Framework and a Keyword-Driven Framework in which both keywords and test data have externalized this instance.
Hybrid testing frameworks combine the strengths of two approaches. By drawing upon all their features to maximize results, this hybrid framework excels in dealing with difficult-to-test situations or project requirements.
Test Automation Best Practices
Test automation offers many benefits. By adhering to the best automated testing practices, you can ensure your strategy delivers maximum returns.
Automated tests help improve software quality while decreasing development times and eliminating repetitive work, but where should you start? Best practices offer an invaluable roadmap towards increasing its overall quality.
Testing processes are key components to any software product's success and longevity since most users will only buy or use your product if it functions as designed.
Manual Testing to detect bugs is costly, time-consuming and often subject to human error - automation testing offers Quality Assurance as an efficient way of improving software quality while making use of limited testing resources efficiently and more cost-effectively than manual methods can alone.
With test automation tools can run more tests faster while increasing test accuracy while freeing QA engineers from manual QA testing duties while relieving engineers of manual testing duties by automating manual Testing.
These top tips will help you to get maximum ROI from your software testing:
- Select the test cases to automate.
- Choose the right automated testing tool.
- Dividing your automated testing efforts.
- Create good, quality test data.
- Create automated tests that resist changes in the user interface.
Select The Test Cases To Automate
As it would not be practical to automate every test, you should prioritize which cases need automation first. Automated Testing offers advantages that increase with each repetition of a test; manual methods tend to work best when conducting one or two-off examinations of large data sets and are rarely run.
At the same time, automation makes sense in situations that call for repeated examination. Automating the following will maximize your testing benefits:
- Tests that are repeated for several builds.
- Human error is prone to occur in tests.
- Multiple data set tests.
- Frequently used functions introduce high-risk conditions.
- Testing that is impossible to do manually.
- Testing that runs on multiple hardware and software configurations.
- Manual Testing can be time-consuming and difficult.
Make an Automation Plan
After setting goals and selecting which tests you want to be automated, you must determine how your automated tests will operate.
Do not create test steps which attempt to cover different aspects of an app at once, as this makes debugging and editing large, complex automated tests more challenging; break your automated tests down into smaller logical ones to simplify managing and editing them easily as well as sharing data, processes, or code between tests; you could even take this opportunity to address new functionality by adding small tests alongside.
In addition; this way you'll have greater chances to update these tests whenever updates arrive rather than waiting until its introduction into an entire feature or component is finished being added into an app before testing it comes into effect rather than waiting until it arrives fully before starting to update its automated tests before updating altogether!
Strive to develop small tests, targeted and have one purpose. Separate tests should be created for reading only or both reading and writing operations so you can reuse individual tests instead of including them with each automated test run.
Your automated tests can be combined into one larger test suite. Automated tests should be grouped based on functional areas within an app, major/minor divisions within the said app, base test sets or any combination thereof that makes sense to you.
A tree of tests might need to be created if an automated test references another automated test.
Choose The Best Automated Test Tool
Test automation is only possible with an automated test tool.
The market is flooded with automated testing tools. It's crucial to choose the option that best meets your needs. When selecting an automated test tool, consider these important factors:
- Support your technology and platforms. What operating system will you be using to test Net or C# applications? Will you be testing web applications? Need support with mobile app testing? Are you working with Android, iOS or both?
- Flexible Testing for all testers. Does your QA team have the ability to write automated scripts? Or do you need keyword testing for certain products?
- It is easy to write automated tests that are rich in features. The automated test tool should support both manual and automated creation. Does it have features to implement checkpoints for verifying values, databases or the key functionality of an application?
- Automated tests should be reusable, maintainable, and resilient to changes made in an application's UI. If our application UI changes, will our automated test break?
- Integrate your tool with the existing ecosystem. Is your tool integrated with your existing CI/CD pipeline, such as Azure DevOps? Your test management framework? How about Jira or source control, a system for defect management?
- Test enterprise-wide applications.
Read More: Utilizing Automated Testing Frameworks
Dividing Your Automated Testing Efforts
QA engineers are adept at producing different tests depending on their skill levels. You should identify each team member's expertise and divide automated testing efforts accordingly; creating automated test scripts requires in-depth knowledge of scripting language; for this task, you need QA engineers who understand the language used by your automated testing tool.
Keyword tests (also called keyword-driven tests) provide an automated testing solution which only requires a little extensive knowledge of a scripting language to automate tests without needing an elaborate script to run them.
With their unique feature of connecting multiple words with actions allowing keyword tests (also called keyword-driven tests), users can perform keystrokes or clicks on buttons/menus etc., for effective test automation without writing test cases or scripts themselves - keyword tests make automation accessible even to non-technical people creating powerful yet robust automated tests at ease.
Keyword tests also simplify use across platforms as users at a wide range of levels can use keyword tests as an automated testing alternative creating powerful and robust automated tests without ever writing automated scripts.
Working alongside other QA engineers within your department on automated testing projects is another beneficial move. Group testing can be far more effective at pinpointing errors. At the same time, you can share projects across testers using an automated test tool.
Create Good, Quality Test Data
Data-driven Testing can be immensely valuable when combined with high-quality test data. Information that needs to be input into automated tests usually is stored externally as text files, XML documents or Excel sheets and then iterated over in an automated test run by testing tools.
External files provide additional flexibility as additional test scenarios can easily be added by adding more test cases without needing to alter existing automated test runs.
At its core, test data creation requires manual labor before being stored in your data repository. With our Data Generator, you can use Table Variables or Excel Files that contain test data quickly.
Generate your preferred type and save it automatically into variables or files - saving both time and energy during data-driven testing processes! This feature helps reduce preparation times considerably.
Making test data may take an effortful process, but the effort will pay dividends in writing automated tests more easily and expanding automated tests as an application matures more smoothly.
Automated Tests That Are Resistant To Changes In The UI
Automation tests created using scripts or keyword testing will play an integral part in testing an app's user interface between builds; particularly, early builds could have different user experiences between builds.
Changes may impact test results or prevent automated tests from working properly with newer versions of an application. Automated testing tools rely on a wide variety of properties to locate objects - sometimes location coordinates may even be used - when trying to identify objects for automated tests.
If the caption or location has changed, an automated test won't be able to locate and detect its object and will fail.
Before running automated tests against updated versions of an app, all old names may need to be modified accordingly before running tests against those versions of an application. By giving each control its name, your automated test can remain resilient against user interface (UI) changes without needing to change itself while also eliminating location coordinates that tend to become less stable over time and break more easily.
4 Steps To Start Automation Testing From Scratch
Start your journey with automation testing by following these four simple steps. The four steps are:
- Determining automation scope.
- Selecting a tool for automation testing.
- Plan, design, and develop.
- Build your report and execute test cases.
Determining The Scope And Extent Of Automation
It would be best if you had an overview of the testing environment, test data and team test status. You can use this step to determine where your software is located.
You can define it based on the following:
- The technical capability of your team.
- Your test cases should be complex.
- Executing the essential features and functions.
- How much of the test critical component is reused.
Choosing An Automation Testing Tool
Test automation works differently in every situation despite its many benefits, yet. Many QA departments have seen great gains through automating testing tasks; on the other hand, some businesses could have used more resources by investing time, effort, money or both into tools they never properly utilized.
Selecting an effective automation testing tool may seem intimidating at first, but choosing wisely is essential to successful automation testing.
Design, Planning, And Development
It would be best if you considered your testing goals, the framework design, the features and the timeframe for creating scripts and running test cases when planning and developing an automation strategy.
Building Your Report And Executing Test Cases
Automation testing tools are used to execute scripted tests.
Either directly through their interface or the test management platform will initiate them for testing purposes. Test reports serve as an overview of all tests completed as part of a project. QA teams can pinpoint test failure quickly by monitoring how automated tests were executed in reports.
Execution of automated tests on reports saves tremendous amounts of time for teams.
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Conclusion
This automation tutorial provided us with a deep understanding of automation testing, how it differs from manual Testing, why automation testing is necessary, as well as some ways to automate Testing.
Automated Testing can play an invaluable role in software development processes and ensure their efficiency and effectiveness.
Still, its return on investment should always be estimated before investing. When budget constraints require prioritizing projects over others, testing ROI must also be carefully assessed.
