As technology changes, organizations face more challenges in keeping their web applications high-quality. However, in the fast-paced agile development environment, along with limited budgets, testing often needs more focus and attention than required.
Doing more testing leads to products with lower quality, delayed releases, unhappy customers, and higher costs. These issues can happen because of a lack of testing planning, development delays, and underestimating the work required to create test cases.
Test engineers try to find bugs or errors before releasing a product. But the truth is, it’s impossible to see every single bug! So, after going live, a quick fix is deployed, and regression testing becomes necessary. Regression testing takes a long time but is essential for stabilizing the product. In these situations, the deployment time keeps getting shorter. How can we deal with this? The answer is automation testing!
This article will explore what automation testing is and what its benefits are.
What is Automation Testing?
Automated testing is a software testing technique that automates validating the software’s functionality and ensuring it meets requirements before release. Automated testing allows organizations to run specific software tests faster without human testers. It is best suited for large or repetitive test cases.
Automation testing uses open-source or paid tools to test software applications quickly, efficiently, and continuously without human intervention. Automated testing can reveal memory, data tables, and file contents, helping determine if the program functions as required. The advantages of an automation framework are that it allows the execution of thousands of varied and lengthy test cases that are impossible with manual testing. This can increase the depth of testing to improve software quality.
Benefits of Automated Testing
Following are the benefits of automation testing in modern software development.
Provides Cross Browser Testing
Manual cross-browser testing can be daunting and lead to numerous challenges and problems. In manual testing, testers must first identify the browsers their web app needs to support. They then create a checklist of all the browsers and execute a single test across different browser versions, operating systems, and configurations to measure the web app’s performance.
Achieving sufficient test coverage can become a nightmare if your audience is diverse and widespread.
Higher Accuracy
One of the crucial benefits of automation testing is increased accuracy compared to manual testing. Automated tests meticulously follow predefined steps every time, eliminating the risk of human error. This ensures consistent and reliable test execution, allowing testers to concentrate on more complex areas.
Reusability of Test Scripts
One significant advantage of automation testing is the ability to reuse test scripts. Crafting compelling test cases requires considerable time and energy, and repeatedly creating the same tests can be exhausting for testers. Yet, with automated testing, you only need to create a test script once, and then you can utilize it multiple times.
Consider the example of cross-browser testing. When performing this type of testing manually, testers may have to develop new test scripts whenever they want to execute the same application across different operating systems and hardware setups. This repetitive task can be exceptionally burdensome and time-consuming.
However, automated test scripts are reusable; testers don’t always require new scripts, even if the operating system or target device changes.
Reduced Cost and Time
While initial setup requires an investment, automation testing reduces the need for repetitive manual testing as projects grow. This efficient utilization of resources translates to substantial cost and time savings over the long run. Testers can redirect their efforts towards more productive tasks like designing new test cases.
Maximize Test Coverage
Among the many benefits of automation testing, maximizing test coverage stands out.
With automation testing, testers can quickly execute a significantly more significant number of test cases. This capability allows for thorough testing coverage of all requirements and features in each test cycle, ensuring that the application is comprehensively evaluated for functionality, performance, and reliability.
By expanding test coverage, the likelihood of detecting bugs rises, averting potential issues and errors in the production environment and improving the overall application performance.
With better test coverage, testers can:
- Understand which test cases are more or less critical for every application.
- Get better traceability between the required requirements and the test cases created to cover them.
- Analyze and compare the test results between previous releases and the current ones.
- Track each build cycle and the fixes made to the project.
- Determine the exit criteria for completing the testing process.
- Enhance the multitasking abilities of individual testers by automating repetitive tasks.
Easy Regression Testing
Regression testing is conducted to verify that a bug fix hasn’t caused new issues, an essential step for every new feature deployed in production. Manual regression testing is time-consuming and repetitive. Automation testing is ideal for regression testing because the test cases typically remain unchanged. The same test script can be rerun multiple times, saving time and effort.
Automated regression testing can run automatically with each new functionality release, eliminating the need for manual intervention.
Faster Feedback Loops
Automated tests enable rapid validation at every stage of the development cycle. This accelerated feedback mechanism facilitates early bug detection and resolution, boosting team efficiency. Widely adopted test automation frameworks like Selenium and Appium contribute to this rapid execution capability.
Better Smoke Testing
Smoke testing allows testers to evaluate if all-important software functionalities work correctly quickly. Regular smoke testing can help testers find critical failures and is recommended as a best practice. However, many organizations avoid it as they feel it will strain the tester’s bandwidth. This is where automation testing comes into play.
The benefits of automation testing include evaluating the stability of a software build by running automated smoke testing for successful build validation. The datasets required to perform smoke tests are rendered automatically, thus enabling the faster determination of software build stability.
Some benefits of automated smoke testing include:
- Easy execution.
- Improves system quality.
- Identifies defects in early stages.
- Reduces overall failure risk.
- Reduces integration risks.
Accessible Data-Driven Testing
Data-driven testing is one of the critical benefits of automation testing. It permits testers to evaluate all functionalities that involve multiple data sets. To perform data-driven testing, we provide various data sets in multiple input fields of the software and test its accuracy.
With automation testing, data-driven testing becomes easy, as we can connect external data sources (like Excel files, CSV files, text files, XMLs, MS Access Tables, etc.) as the data set. We can store the result in the same or different file using our automated test script. This saves testers time and effort by automatically taking inputs through the connected data source.
Advantages of data-driven testing:
- Test any application with multiple data sets when performing regression testing.
- Organize and store validation and test data in a single file, separate from test case logic.
- Store test scripts under one repository.
- Reduces the number of test cases and scripts.
- No test script changes are required when changing test data.
Parallel Test Execution
Parallel test execution is a decisive advantage enabled by automation. Multiple test cases can run simultaneously across different environments, browsers, and devices. This parallel approach significantly reduces overall testing time compared to sequential execution. For large, complex systems, parallel testing optimizes resource usage while minimizing testing durations.
Automation Testing Tools
Following are the best automation testing tools available to support your testing needs.
LambdaTest
LambdaTest is an AI-powered test orchestration and execution platform that lets you run manual and automated tests at scale with over 3000+ real devices, browsers, and OS combinations. Its cloud service allows teams to significantly scale up their test coverage by conducting parallel, cross-browser, and cross-device testing at a faster pace.
Key features:
- It provides access to over 3,000 devices, browsers, and OSs for testing.
- Supports running Cypress tests in parallel and on different browsers.
- Allows testing from 132 countries to check geolocation.
- Integrates with other testing tools and frameworks.
Selenium
Selenium is a viral open-source tool for automatically testing web applications.
It has different parts, like Selenium WebDriver, Selenium Grid, and Selenium IDE.
Key features:
- Supports programming languages like C#, Java, Python, JavaScript, etc.
- Works with many browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari, etc.
- You can run tests on your computer or remote servers.
- Allows running tests in parallel on different browsers.
- Integrates with other testing tools and CI/CD systems.
Appium
Appium is an open-source tool for automatically testing mobile apps. It lets you create automated tests for Android and iOS apps, including hybrid and web-based apps.
Key features:
- Supports many programming languages like Java, C#, Python, etc.
- Allows writing tests that work on both Android and iOS.
- Can run tests on real devices, simulators, and emulators.
- Integrates with other testing tools and CI/CD systems.
Cypress
Cypress is a tool for automatically testing web applications end-to-end.
It can run directly inside the browser simultaneously with the application you’re testing.
Key features:
- Uses JavaScript as the programming language.
- Provides snapshots of each test step and makes it easy to debug.
- Allows controlling how functions, servers, timers, and networks behave.
- Integrates with Cypress Cloud for test performance optimization.
- Works with widespread continuous integration (CI) tools.
Ranorex Studio
Ranorex Studio is a tool for automatically testing graphical user interfaces (GUIs) of web, mobile, and desktop applications. It offers low-code automation and a complete IDE (Integrated Development Environment).
Key features:
- Supports VB.Net and C# programming languages.
- Works with a wide range of web, mobile, and desktop technologies.
- It has a “Ranorex Spy” tool to identify GUI elements reliably.
- Allows creating tests through recording and scripting.
- Supports distributed or parallel testing using Selenium Grid.
- Integrates with other testing frameworks and CI tools.
Best Practices for Automated Testing
Here are some critical automated testing best practices:
Test Case Design and Maintenance:
- Prioritize simplicity and maintainability when writing test cases to ensure they are easy to understand and update.
- Organize test cases logically and use descriptive names for better readability and collaboration.
- Regularly review and update test cases to ensure they align with changing requirements and application updates.
Test Automation Framework Selection:
- Choose the proper test automation framework based on the project’s requirements, programming languages, and team expertise.
- Evaluate factors like cross-browser support, parallel execution, reporting capabilities, and integration with other tools.
- Opt for widely adopted, well-documented frameworks with active community support for long-term sustainability.
Test Data Management:
- Implement robust data management strategies to ensure test data integrity and consistency across test runs.
- Utilize data parameterization, data-driven testing, and external data sources for efficient test data handling.
Test Environment Configuration:
- Set up dedicated test environments that closely mimic production environments for accurate and reliable test results.
- Implement version control and configuration management practices for test environments and test data.
- Automate test environment setup and teardown processes for consistent and efficient test execution.
Conclusion
This article outlines several significant benefits of utilizing automated testing tools and techniques. By automating the testing process, companies can attain more precise results, save both time and money, obtain quicker feedback on issues, conduct multiple tests simultaneously, expand test coverage, reuse test scripts across various phases, align with contemporary development methodologies such as agile and continuous integration, and enhance collaboration among team members.
Specific advantages like automated cross-browser testing, efficiently running regression tests, better smoke testing, and data-driven testing make automation testing even more valuable. These capabilities allow teams to deliver high-quality software that works well for their customers using different browsers, devices, and configurations.
Automation testing will become essential as customers demand faster software releases and higher quality. Companies that adopt automation testing following industry best practices will gain an essential competitive advantage. They will be able to consistently deliver superior software while optimizing their resources and maximizing efficiency.
