With a high demand for continuously delivering the best quality software products in a highly competitive market, rapid feedback on software quality is gaining attention and many software developing organizations just need it badly. In the past, automated tests written to get this kind of quick feedback usually comprised of unit tests written and executed by developers, or end-to-end test scripts created and maintained by test automation engineers-maintainability and reusability that is more often used for recording and maintenance of horror replays.
Since then, test automation has become an integral or inevitable part of the testing process rather than an extra effort to put in.
The importance of automation testing for software testing can be analyzed by the number of automation testing companies that offer their services to the organizations to reap benefits as much as possible. It is becoming more and more critical for the software development industries to implement test automation as a key player in the testing process of complex software applications. That’s the reason quite a large number of automation testing companies have founded their revenues in providing test automation services to the companies in dire need of its use.
However, despite the arrival of this field, there are still many basic concepts that are unknown to people who participate in or rely on test automation. In this article, we would like to explain some of them that are as under;
Its check automation, not test automation
First, the term “test automation” is genetically flawed. Most people have researched and come up with their findings that testing is a process of learning through exploration and experimentation. This is a process that cannot be automated. On the other hand, checking is the process of applying algorithmic decision rules to specific observations made on the product (software in this case). This process can be automated, usually through what most people call “test automation”.
However, as long as people know what is automated (checking) and what is not automated (testing), using the “automatic test” label is inherently wrong. This difference between testing and inspection also provides a reason why manual testing as an activity will cease to exist, at least for the foreseeable future: testing activities cannot be automated!
Test automation is a software development
Since implementing test automation usually involves designing and writing software-software used to check other software-related patterns and practices should also be used when writing test code.
Example practices that can and should be applied include (keep it simple, stupid-your test code should be as simple as possible, but not simpler) and (don’t repeat yourself-try to double the code to an absolute minimum). Regarding the testing code, another good practice you should adopt is to check your checks regularly. The test code is software, so it must be tested appropriately. How else can you ensure that automatic checks really fail when they should?
There is no static input in the real world – Teams that conduct automated testing usually use static hard-coded parameters rather than dynamic parameters. This not only misses the opportunity to simulate actual use cases; it also fails to correctly reflect the performance and scalability indicators of using the cache. Dynamic parameters can be randomly generated using a standard scripting language, or they can be driven from a prepared input file. The parameters also need to be as realistic as possible. For complex numeric fields (such as phone numbers or amounts), filling text fields with meaningless values and simple serial numbers may lose even the smallest edge case validation.
Know when to run automated tests – The test is written before the code in the test-driven approach. Even TDD is not being followed by your development team, as long as you create a callable interface and write tests immediately, you can save the time required to perform manual functional tests. The amount of testing required from the first stub interface to prepare for deployment into an integrated environment is almost always underestimated. Failure to write tests as early as possible will always lead to increased development workload, manual testing functions when coding changes (as opposed to clicking buttons or single-line commands to run automated tests), or increased time for debugging all programs in quality assurance, not sufficient in the development process.
Final Thoughts
As with most process automation cases, automated testing is neither a panacea nor a cookie-cutter solution. The value of real user testing is still valid and necessary because there will always be use cases that designers, developers, and testers cannot anticipate. By taking the time to identify all use cases that can be automated, choosing the tools that best meet the needs of the organization, and using best practices such as dynamic parameters and testing as early as possible, you will surely have a chance to increase the overall productivity, shorten quality assurance cycles, build trust among customers and achieve a higher ROI.
