In today’s world, software testing is an essential element of the development process. For a long time, big teams of people carried out all manual testing for the system. Testing teams have found a way to speed up the deployment process using test automation in recent years. If you want to succeed in automation testing, the key is to use a cost-effective method with a result-oriented approach. Here, we’ll look at how to implement a good test automation strategy.
What is Test Automation ?
Automated testing is the technique of executing tests, maintaining test data, and using the results to enhance software quality. As a primary quality assurance measure, its actions require the full involvement of all the software development teams—test automation benefits from the participation of everyone from business analysts to software developers and DevOps experts.
The Advantages of Test Automation
The Feedback cycle is Faster
Without automated testing, it can take a long time to get feedback on new features. Automated testing reduces the time it takes to get feedback on your product, allowing you to move faster through the development process.
Test automation can help you find issues and faults early in the development process, which improves your team’s efficiency.
The team Saves time
By automating your testing procedure, your team will save time verifying newly developed features. Other departments that rely on test results, such as marketing, design, or product owners, benefit from improved communication. Logs of automated tests are easily accessible by departments in these companies.
Cost saving for Your Company
You’ll save time and money by using an automated testing environment, which will benefit your business. Projects can benefit greatly from this.
Building an automated testing environment involves time and resources. The chances are good that you’ll spend money on an automated testing product that can help you create a stable test automation environment.
Increased Test Coverage
There is a limit to how many tests you can run manually because of this limitation. It’s easier to write new tests and add them to your automated test suite with automation. It improves your product’s test coverage, resulting in a higher-quality application by testing more features.
Developers may also design more in-depth tests for complex use cases because of automated testing. Automated testing can execute lengthy tests often overlooked during manual testing.
A test suite’s Reusability
At the start, putting together an automated testing framework can be difficult. You may easily reuse tests once you’ve defined a test suite for different use cases or projects. Automated test suites allow you to integrate new projects quickly.
Faster Market Time
Automated testing and validation of new features are possible. Allows businesses to get their products to market more quickly by reducing their time for feedback and testing.
Improved Insights
Automated testing provides more information than manual testing when a test fails. Aside from giving you an understanding of the application, automated software testing reveals the contents of the RAM, data tables, files, and other program memory states. It assists developers in determining what went wrong.
Enhanced Accuracy
Even the most experienced manual tester can make mistakes. Errors are more likely to occur when testing a complex use case. When it comes to automated testing, you can rest assured that the results will be the same every time you run them.
Automated Testing Offers Additional Features
For example, you can run an automated test suite that simulates the actions of thousands of people who use your web app. Manual testing has no way of simulating this type of behavior. Developers save a lot of time with features like this.
Less Stress for The QA Team
You can free up your QA team’s time by using an automated testing strategy instead of relying on manual testing. Because of this, the job description of an engineer in quality assurance becomes more interesting when eliminating the repetitive nature of manual testing.
Numerous quality assurance engineers see testing automation as a chance to build new tools to enhance the present testing suite or provide new features.
Assess Your Build’s stability Quickly
Using test automation, you may run automated tests on your build to ensure its stability. Validating product stability often requires smoke testing. On the other side, smoke testing is time demanding and requires human involvement from the testing engineer, such as creating test data databases.
It is also possible to automate smoke testing through test automation. Carried out Smoke tests using databases that are automatically generated and prepared. So you can quickly assess the build’s stability.
Eliminating Human Error
Manual testing provides the chance for human error. Automated testing is the best technique to avoid mistakes in challenging situations. Even with automated testing, mistakes can happen. On the other hand, test automation greatly reduces the likelihood of human error in your test suite.
What is a Test Automation Strategy ?
An efficient and result-oriented test automation strategy is always the best way to achieve success in automated testing. Businesses can avoid major technological failures by implementing a thorough test automation strategy.
How To Build The Right Test Automation Strategy ?
Define scope and Goals
Due to human monitoring and approval over the internet, automation of all software testing is impossible. To begin an automation project, you must first determine your goals for the project and then pick which tests you want to automate. Automation Feasibility Analysis is another name for this procedure.
Must run tests frequently and replicate tedious, time-consuming operations suitable for automation that requires processing large datasets.
Select the right tools
It’s not a mistake to pay attention to a tool’s popularity from the beginning. Popular tools tend to be reliable and widely discussed on the web, which makes them more trustworthy. On the internet, an automation engineer can find a wealth of helpful information and fascinating methods.
As a result, it is simpler to recruit QA engineers who have experience with Selenium, Appium, or Cucumber than a new and promising QA technology that has just come on the market.
Establish the Test Approach
Once a team has decided what to test, they must then decide how to test it, i.e., which test to run when. It is best to use the testing pyramid to structure tests effectively,
An automated test suite should include a testing pyramid, also known as a test automation pyramid, which specifies the sorts of tests. Additionally, it describes the order and frequency of these testing. The goal is to get feedback quickly, so that code changes don’t disrupt existing features. In addition, fast results lead to faster improvements and ultimately faster time-to-market.
Must consider an organization’s present QA methods when developing new testing procedures. It takes time for a seismic shift in thinking, skillset, and learning. It means you must extrapolate immediate automation procedures from what team members are already doing.
Determine which components of the current process to implement automation – role, testing levels, and task ownership.
Most likely candidates for automation include :
- Unit testing- involves a development team familiar with the backend testing all the way down to the smallest functional components of code.
- Component testing- the process of having a front-end testing team examine each object or component of the product.
- Integrated unit testing- an investigation into the behavior of unit assemblies.
- API testing- a subset of integration testing focuses on API functionalities.
- Compatibility testing- the process of examining how a piece of software performs under various operating systems, network configurations, and hardware configurations.
- Smoke testing—a review of a new build to confirm that fundamental functionality works properly before moving on to more complex features.
- GUI testing- check to see if the graphical user interface fits the requirements given in the software specifications.
- End-to-end testing- involves simulating real-world user scenarios in examining the entire workflow from start to finish.
- Regression testing- a process for determining if recent code changes have had no effect on previously untouched areas of software functionality.
Design Test Cases
Start designing test cases after deciding on a testing strategy and deciding on suitable testing tools. It is advisable to seek guidance from those who have experience with test automation if a team is new to it. Don’t expect manual testers to become automated testers overnight without the help of professionals.
Create Execution Plan
Once created the test cases, we must run them in the correct order to find issues and ensure that each feature performs as intended before release. Start with a small set of test cases and work your way up to larger test suites. Every time a change to the code should run regression tests to ensure that nothing has broken due to the change.
When laying out a strategy for test automation execution, be sure to include a list of daily activities and processes. In this sense, having a CI/CD pipeline is beneficial. It takes care of everything from pushing code into version control to running tests, integrating it, and making sure it’s ready to go live when the time comes.
Review Test Results
There will be several automated tests and software parameters tested as part of the CI/CD process. However, there will be several tests that fail and need to get resolved.
QAs can also discover which test suites take too long and optimize them after the first set of tests. Consider the opinions of other QA managers and DevOps engineers and managers, and sales representatives to determine the best way to structure the QA process.
Document everything: the project goals, needs, and requirements for the test cases and test scripts and the results and analysis and optimization measures.
Benefits of a Test Automation Strategy
- It allows for a more in-depth examination. Accomplish the most challenging test automation activities quickly and easily, improving the overall robustness of your products.
- Promote reusing essential components. As a result, employees can better focus on other aspects of their jobs and businesses, boosting productivity.
- Lowers the expense of maintenance. Changing and updating your testing approach is a simple process. These changes can be rapid and adopted by the team members.
- Establishes your company’s testing standard. Because it is comprehensive and robust, your plan will become the organization’s standard.
- Stakeholders will have more faith in shippable software if your strategy is result-oriented.
What are the Software Test Automation Services ?
The software test Automation services include test automation strategy, tool selection, test environment setup, test data preparation, test scripts development and maintenance, and test monitoring and reporting.
What are some automated testing Best Practices ?
Following are the Best Practices in Automation Testing
Select Automated Test Caese
Automating all testing is impossible, thus choosing which tests to automate first is critical. Better leave Some tests to manual testing. Automated testing has a significant advantage in the number of times a test may run. Test cases that are often run and require a substantial quantity of data are suitable for automation.
Choose the Right Automated Testing Tool
To automate testing, you must first select an automated testing technology. There are a variety of automated testing solutions on the market, so you must pick the one that best fits your needs.
Divide Your Automated Testing Effort
QA engineers are typically responsible for creating a variety of tests based on their abilities. It is essential to assess each team member’s level of skill and experience and divide your automated testing efforts accordingly.
Generate High-Quality Test Data
For data-driven testing, it’s critical to have accurate test data. Input data for an automated test kept in an external file. Can populate this data set from a database or any other data source, such as text or XML files, Excel sheets, or database tables. If you’re using an automated testing tool, make sure it understands the data files and iterates overall.
Integrate Automated Tests Resistant to UI changes
It is necessary to consider the application under test when creating automated tests using scripts or keyword tests. Early on, the application’s look and feel may change between builds. Changes to your automated tests may not operate with future versions of the application if they have an impact on the results. Automated testing techniques rely on a long list of attributes to locate and identify an object. Sometimes a testing tool depends on the object’s location coordinates.
Conclusion
Big things can come from a well-executed testing approach! An effective test automation strategy is essential to fully reap the benefits of automated testing and achieve the desired degree of success.
