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Automating test automation to reduce regression efforts has numerous advantages over manual tracking of all changes to an application, from improving test coverage and execution time, releasing resources, saving money, liberating resources and saving resources, as well as quickly providing feedback about changes that impact codebase efficiency - such as rapid feedback can drastically speed up app development processes.
While advantages of test automation framework, improper implementation may create problems.
When designing your automation suite, carefully assess its architecture and craft an automated testing strategy which achieves maximum results - this is where best practices come into play. Faulty tests resulting from noncompliance can have unpredictable or ineffective results, which are unmanageable. This blog will present numerous best practices for developing your test automation suite and why adhering to them is essential.
What Is A Test Framework?
Before we discuss the most prevalent framework types and their advantages, let's define the test automation framework.
A type of testing framework refers to a collection of principles or guidelines used for developing test cases efficiently and tools intended to assist QA professionals in testing more quickly.
Read More: 5 Must-Know Reasons for Building Your Testing Automation Project: Maximize Cost, Gain & Impact!
7 Test Automation Best Practices
Some of the top test automation methods are finding and automating appropriate tests, selecting suitable tools and frameworks, and keeping analytic records for testing analysis.
Organizations that adhere to these best practices not only improve testing results but can save expenses, increase productivity, and faster product delivery of high-quality software products. Let's take a closer look at these excellent practices.
Decide Which Test Suites To Automate
Automatic testing cannot cover every test case, but not every automated test case provides a worthwhile return on investment.
Therefore, only automate those which bring maximum value to your application - use criteria like those below to help identify which are most suited to automation:
- Automating test cases that frequently run against every build/release of your application will save both times and prevent other developers from being involved in its testing team process.
These may include smoke tests, sanity checks and regression testing.
- Test Cases Prone to Human Error: Automating test cases susceptible to human errors can significantly enhance test execution accuracy and lead to greater test execution success.
- Stress and load tests (or stress/load simulation): Since these assessments require many visitors, automating them is ideal.
- Data-driven tests: As this type of test necessitates repetitive data sets, automating it saves time and eliminates an arduous process.
- Automation can make these tests faster and less tedious; automating them may allow you to bypass having to switch browsers and operating systems manually - saving both time and hassle in testing scenarios that span multiple platforms and browsers.
Use The Right Testing Tool And Framework
Your overall ease and complexity when writing and running tests depends on the tool and features it provides, which should also include consideration of the costs involved with maintaining them.
Here are a few factors to keep in mind when choosing the best test automation tool which meets these criteria:
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The Nature Of The Application That's Being Tested: Your application will determine which tools you use when testing.
Tools are commonly utilized for creating end-to-end test automation suites on web apps; mobile application testing tools may also work effectively.
When choosing which device best meets your testing needs, consider its features, community support and maintenance status before selecting one as your go-to option.
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Team Fit: As part of selecting appropriate tools for your team, keep the knowledge and experiences of members in mind when selecting tools, especially languages or frameworks used by test automation tools.
Java, Python, Ruby, JavaScript and C# are the most frequently utilized programming languages for test automation.
Each offers extensive how-to tutorials, blog posts, videos, books and conversations on sites like StackOverflow and actively updated functional testing libraries such as Playwright for Java/Python teams or Selenium for Ruby developers specializing in test automation.
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Open Source Vs Commercial: Your budget will ultimately dictate whether or not you use an open-source or commercial testing tool, though each has distinct benefits and drawbacks.
While commercial solutions usually provide more excellent dependability, additional functionality, and technical support services, an open-source testing solution could fit the bill too.
Playwright, an open-source testing tool with rapid releases and extensive capabilities, has become popular with programmers worldwide.
Some come in both free and premium editions; the former provides cross-browser testing, auto-wait, screenshots, videos, and record-and-playback tools as well as record-and-playback to aid automation, while its paid edition provides dashboard access, which stores test logs, video recording results and test results in one central place for easy retrieval and analysis.
Keep Records Of Tests For Analysis
Tests will fail occasionally, and it is crucial that when they do, you identify why to fix any underlying issues.
Screenshots, logs, exception reporting, and video recordings must all be available when debugging failed test cases; remembering all results to evaluate your application status effectively is equally as essential.
An essential aspect of test analysis is that an automated test report allows you to generate this critical document after modifying your codebase.
A message will highlight testing attributes such as results, execution duration and environment-specific parameters that could help expand test coverage. Reviewing your test report can help identify slow and flaky tests that lead to bottlenecks and provide critical insights and feedback regarding the health of your application, such as failure reasons, coverage level, and the proportion of trials that either succeeded or failed.
Set Up A Testing Environment
Setting up your test environment is the first step toward reaping the total rewards of test automation efforts. Here, you will implement strategies for test execution, report production and data storage.
An effective performance testing environment comprises all the hardware, software, and network configurations necessary to run tests successfully. Setting up your unit testing environment should resemble production as closely as possible to uncover any configuration-specific issues more quickly.
Here are a few more ideas when setting up a testing environment:
- Reconcile hardware and network configurations to ensure accurate testing results; otherwise, your tests could lead to false alarms.
- Prepare and organize test data to be readily available during your tests; remember to delete it after completion.
- Consider masking production data containing sensitive information, if necessary, once your test environment has been configured.
Once complete, conduct a smoke test on it to test build stability.
Divide And Conquer Testing Efforts
Instead of assigning all test automation duties to one team member, try spreading these responsibilities among several individuals based on their talents and levels of experience.
You might give script creation and test case construction/data generation duties among team members with programming knowledge while delegating test case development/generation to others who don't specialize in programming but possess experience evaluating user workflows - this approach promotes collective ownership over testing efforts.
Your allocation can be customized based on the tools your team employs; for instance, more non-programmers could be assigned as test case authors if your team relies on low-code or codeless testing tools.
Dividing test automation efforts increases efficiency, fosters collaboration among team members and decreases dependence on one team member alone.
Use Quality Test Data
At the core of any tremendous data-driven tests lies input data collection. Therefore, taking extra care when collecting meaningful test data improves results.
When creating test data, consider these points:
- Make Sure Data Is Accurate: Test data should reflect real-life scenarios as closely as possible; for instance, reasonable test data for an 18-year-old is 16.
- Some Data Should Be Considered Invalid: Test data such as "ABC" for age should cause errors to surface during analysis.
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Data Should Cover Boundaries: Test data must contain boundary conditions; applications that rely on them often break due to them.
For instance, test data for voting age must include "18 Years Old".
- Test Data Should Reflect Rare Scenarios: Test data must address rare scenarios (for instance, offering a discount to online shopping site clients every year).
External files such as CSV, XLSX, JSON or XML are frequently utilized to store test data due to their flexibility, extendibility, and manageability.
Create your test automation framework so that parsing test data and its iterations on its contents are seamless.
Create Automated Tests That Are Resistant To Changes In The UI
End-to-end (E2E) test automation relies on your application's user interfaces for success. E2E tests involve finding and performing actions on web elements on pages; to be effective, they must remain unaffected when user interface changes occur during the development process or when you improve them - otherwise, the tests would fail miserably.
However, selectors that heavily depend upon the order of web items in the Document Object Model (DOM) could make your tests vulnerable.
One way around this issue would be to give each web element in your application unique selectors - not only will this reduce test code changes due to user interface changes, but it will provide a more straightforward user experience overall.
As part of your test automation framework design when developing the Page Object Model (POM). Implementing such design patterns helps minimize code duplication and updates as program changes take effect and make your codebase more extensible; developing autonomous end-to-end tests also ensures dependable findings.
Conclusion
Test automation framework can help developers quickly launch high-quality apps by speeding up test execution times, increasing coverage rates and correctness levels, using quality test data sets within an appropriate testing framework, keeping test logs for analysis purposes, etc.
To maximize its use appropriately, however, certain best practices need to be applied - these may include outlining test cases to automate, using quality data for analyses, and keeping logs of tests for analysis purposes.
