With the stiff business competition existing today, enterprises need faster releases and quality software to meet the increasing demand for their services and products. They are embracing agile and DevOps practices by leveraging automated testing software to achieve faster releases and quality products along with achieving a quicker return on investment.

Contents 1. What is Automated Software Testing? 2. Why Automated Software Testing is important? 3. What are the benefits of Automated Software Testing? 4. How does Automated Testing work? 5. What are the most commonly used Automated Testing Tools? 6. What are the Common Challenges in Automated Testing? 7. Conclusion

What is Automated Software Testing?

Why Automated Software Testing is important?

What are the benefits of Automated Software Testing?

Automated Testing Application-Wise Benefits

Increases test coverage:

Ensures test accuracy:

Eases regression testing time:

Facilitates with re-usable test scripts:

Helps to Validate Complex Scenarios effectively:

Automated Testing Cost-Wise Benefits

Saves Cost:

Increases ROI:

Saves Time:

How does Automated Testing work?

Any organization that wants to implement automation testing follows a testing framework approach. The most favoured testing frameworks are keyword-driven framework, data-driven framework, linear scripting framework and modular testing framework.

To test small applications, a linear scripting framework is used, because it uses test scripts that don’t require much planning and also do not support reusable scripts.

Data-driven frameworks enable software testers to develop test scripts that are able to work for multiple data sets. This framework offers wide quality coverage with fewer tests.

Keyword-driven frameworks are worked out using table formats to define keywords for each function and execution method. Those software testers who don’t have in-depth knowledge of programming can use keywords to develop test scripts.

The most popular test automation tools which are open-source are Selenium 4, Robotium and Cypress. Selenium can automate and run tests across various web browsers and also works well with popular programming languages such as C#, Java and Python. Robotium is best used for user acceptance, function and system tests for android devices. End-to-end testing, integration and unit tests work perfectly well with the Cypress tool.

What are the most commonly used Automated Testing Tools?

Appium:

EggPlant:

Katalon Studio:

Selenium:

TestComplete:

Testsigma:

Tosca:

UFT:

What are the Common Challenges in Automated Testing?

1. Need to maintain effective communication between teams:

2. Critical to Select the right test automation tool:

3. Adopt a proper and effective testing approach:

4. Analyze tests to be automated:

Conclusion

The post Automated Software Testing – What, Why, Tools, Challenges first appeared on TestingXperts.

Enterprises across industries continue to demand faster releases and quality software to withstand the ever-changing market scenario and competition.

With enterprises following DevOps and agile methodologies of software development, software testing forms an integral part of it. The earlier manual method of testing does not suffice the present-day connected devices and complicated architecture applications with industry 4.0 in place.

Contents

1. What is Automation Testing?
2. What does Test Automation Do?
3. Significance of Automation in Testing for Enterprises?
4. What-are-the-Benefits-of-Automation-Testing?
5. What are the Various Components of Automation Testing?
6. Automation Testing Tool Best Practices
7. What is the Actual Process of Test Automation?
8. What Does an Automation Tester Do?
9. What are Automation testing challenges and how to overcome them?
10. Automation Testing Vs Unit Testing
11. Why Should You Leverage Next-gen Testing Services Provider for Test Automation?
12. Related Queries on Automation Testing

There is a need for businesses to adopt test automation that ensures faster and quality releases along with saving considerable time, and efforts.

What is Automation Testing?

According to WIKI, automation testing is the use of software separate from the software being tested to control the execution of tests and the comparison of actual outcomes with expected outcomes.

Test automation can automate some repetitive but necessary tasks in a formalized testing process already in place, or perform additional testing that might be difficult to do manually.

Test automation can speed up the release cycles, increase coverage and ensures quality software releases.

In manual testing, a human is involved to perform the manual tests that are more prone to human error and might even lack their correctness. This sort of human involved testing encloses many gaps which are seen and sometimes even have missed project timelines due to the huge number of misidentified bugs.

But, as automation testing involves the usage of tools and test scripts to test the software, the results are more reliable and delivers accurate results while testing various use cases and user scenarios.

Hence, this sort of automation testing ensures effective outcomes and can be successfully used by businesses to ensure faster and quality releases.

Automated testing is also known as test automation is a method in software testing that effectively makes use of special test automation tools. These tools are used to control the execution of tests using well-crafted test cases for each of the user scenarios and compares the actual test results to the predicted or the expected results.

It is actually a process that validates if the software is functioning appropriately and meeting the given requirements using these test automation tools.

What does Test Automation Do?

Automation testing meaning can be broadly defined as the process which involves running scripts that are executed by leveraging software testing tools. Automated test systems ensure high accuracy and reliability of the test results.

As no human observations are involved, it ensures more accurate test results. Moreover, this sort of automation testing using open source and paid test automation tools is most suitable for regression testing, performance testing, load testing, security testing along with other types of testing.

Significance of Automation in Testing for Enterprises?

Software testing is essentially an important part of the software development life cycle (SDLC) and should be taken up to ensure quality software.

Earlier manual testing was the major mode of testing but with advanced applications and connected devices in place, it is essential to have Test Automation to ensure faster and quality releases.

Even smaller and mid-sized companies in their quest to have good quality products continue to adopt test automation best practices to deliver high-performing products to their clients.

For enterprises, with automation in testing in place, there is a faster feedback cycle and that brings faster validation at various phases in product development.

The other benefit of automation testing is the testing procedure becomes automated as the test scripts are run by the test automation tools without much interference of QA.

Test automation also helps enterprises to improve the communication between DevOps, QA teams and product owners who depend on the results of these automated tests as these results are more reliable than the manual testing results.

It is more important to note that automation testing is best suitable for applications that need to be tested for various versions, platforms, and operating systems.

Test automation involves the usage of tests that are repeatable and can be run many times to test various conditions and scenarios.

It is best suited with regression tests and high-risk functionality tests to check whether they fail under real-time conditions.

These automated test results help to save businesses of any probable loss due to their application failure as with effective automated software testing the results are more reliable.

What are the Benefits of Automation Testing?

There are many benefits with Test Automation which have been broadly classified as Qualitative and Quantitative benefits.

Qualitative Benefits of Automation in Testing

– Speeds up the testing cycle with automated runs

– Reduces test execution time effectively

– Increases test coverage on each testing cycle

– Ensures ease of test case maintenance

– Reduces the need to update scripts in case of changes to the application

– Ensures faster test scripts generation

– Facilitates reusability of code

– Reduces manual intervention and they can be utilized for functional testing

– Reduces testing timelines significantly

– Reduces regression testing time enormously

– Saves time as automated testing brings in more efficiency

– Improves test accuracy compared to manual testing

– Breaks up large business processes into smaller components to be re-used multiple times

– Ensures longer automation code life

– Increases the team’s testing speed

Quantitative Benefits of Automation in Testing

– Generates quicker ROI

– Reduces QA cycle times by up to 80%

– Lowers the overall QA costs up to 60%

– Improves organizational efficiency

– Ensures cost optimization

– Delivers faster time to market

– Helps improve the business bottom line

After having known about the various benefits of Automation testing, it is necessary to know about the different types of automation testing.

What are the Types of Automation Testing?

Unit Testing:

This is the first type of automation testing in which the individual components of an application are tested. These tests are usually written by the developers but sometimes automation testers also write them. These tests are usually performed during the software development phase.

Smoke testing:

This type of testing is performed to check whether the build is stable or not. If the build is not stable, then it will be sent back to the developers as an unstable build and if the build is stable then testers will accept it to perform further testing on the build.

Black box testing:

This form of testing is performed to check if there are any incorrect or missing functions, checks for the existence of any interface errors, or any behaviour related or performance errors and also checks the presence of termination errors if any.

Integration testing:

In this integration testing, the application modules are typically integrated logically and tested as a group. Essentially, this form of testing checks and verifies the data communication between different modules of the application.

Functional testing:

This form of testing is done to check if all the functions work as expected or not. This involves testing APIs, database, security testing and also tests the overall functionality of the application.

Regression testing:

This is an exhaustive testing methodology done to check whether all the existing features are functioning well even with recent code changes.

It basically verifies that the old code works in the same way as they were before making any changes to the code.

What are the Various Components of Automation Testing?

Automated unit tests:

These tests are primarily designed and crafted to test the software code. These tests categorically search for script errors, or if any bugs or any other issues within the written code.

Automated web services tests:

These tests are useful to test the user interface part of the web services. Protocols like SOAP and REST are used to test a web service.

This sort of testing determines the XML request and validates the response against the request sent which is achieved by the web services testing.

Automated API tests:

These tests allow the software to communicate effectively with other software applications. These API tests help to check the functionality and security of underlying layers.

Automated GUI tests:

These tests focus on testing the graphical user interface of the application under test.

It involves checking the screens with various controls like menus, buttons, icons, and all types of toolbars, menu bars dialogue boxes, and windows.

Automation Testing Tool Best Practices

Below listed are 6 best practices for test automation tool:

1. Select the right automation tool:

Testing teams must select the right automation testing tool that is in-line with their project requirements which helps them to execute automated test cases in an effective manner.

2. Design tests before automating them:

It’s always preferred and is considered as a good practice to create test cases before initiating the test automation process. A good test design will eventually help in finding defects and fixing them.

3. Don’t plan to automate unstable functionality:

Whenever there is a new feature or functionality that is to be tested, care should be taken such that automation testing will be taken up only for stable functionalities.

4. Decide which tests to automate:

Every feature cannot be automated as there are certain features that require manual testing. A proper automation test strategy needs to be put in place to fulfil all those test cases that need to be automated.

5. Early and frequent testing:

To leverage test automation, it is much better to start testing early on in the software development process. By running automated tests often, testers will be in a better position to detect bugs and resolve them at the earliest. This would save time and cost which would have been spent otherwise on fixing bugs at a later stage of the software development process.

6. Do not completely rely on UI test automation:

Completely relying on UI test automation is not considered as a best practice as every application might have some UI changes done. Hence, UI testing should be planned carefully to ensure the app delivers a great user experience to end-users.

Some of the Most commonly used Test Automation tools are:

Below is the automation testing tools list that will help you understand more about each of these tools

Selenium:

Selenium is one of the most popular test automation tool and is the preferred tool for web automation testing for DevOps. Selenium offers two parts of its software, Web driver and IDE (Integrated Development Environment). Selenium automation testing is also one of the most preferred automation testing in the market these days.

Appium:

It is an open-source test automation framework that can be used with native, hybrid and mobile web applications to test them.

It facilitates to make use of preferred test practices, frameworks, and tools. It is preferred to automate any mobile app from any language and any test framework.

Cucumber:

It is an Open source automation testing tool that revolves around behavior-driven development.  

Ranorex:

This is a unique test automation tool that can be used to test web apps, desktop or mobile applications.

TestComplete:

This is the first automation testing tool that has AI with a visual recognition engine that can test with or without scripts and the tool can be used to test desktop, mobile, and web applications extensively.

Microfocus UFT:

The Unified Functional testing tool (UFT Tool) is used in regressive and functional test automation.

It also supports API and web services testing, continuous testing, support for testing ERP and CRM applications.

Apache JMeter:

This is the most popular performance testing tool that perfectly measures the performance of your software. It is built on java and runs functional tests to measure the performance of web applications.

Tosca:

This is a very effective testing tool that can be used for end-to-end testing as it supports functional testing, load testing, risk-based testing, test data management and also app testing.

What is the Actual Process of Test Automation?

10 Basic Steps for a Well-Defined Test Automation

1. Evaluate to understand the need for automation based on project type

2. Define automation goals and priorities

3. Plan automated testing strategy

4. Select the right automation tool & framework based upon the project requirements

5. Decide on what test cases to automate

6. Develop good quality test data

7. Create automated tests more resistant to UI changes

8. Execute the tests for the test scripts developed

9. Test early and often with CI/CD pattern

10. Maintain the test scripts

Business Benefits with a well-defined Test Automation Approach

– Delivers quality software products

– Increases release velocity through the CI/CD model

– Reduces human errors as human tasks are automated

– Ensures cost optimization

– Maximizes ROI

– Ensures faster time to market

What Does an Automation Tester Do?

The QA automation tester and the automation test engineers are the main people involved to achieve test automation initiatives. They know how to automate for the successful roll-out of quality products for businesses.

The QA automation tester is responsible for designing and writing test automation scripts as the first phase and they use various types of test automation frameworks to achieve successful test automation.

They run test scripts to ensure all the scenarios are successfully tested and they have a close association with the developers and other QA analysts.

They log bugs and issues in various test management tools such that the developers work on these bugs and fix them.

Once again automated regression testing is done to ensure the new functionalities do not affect the functionalities of existing features.

What are Automation testing challenges and how to overcome them?

Though Test automation brings about a lot of advantages for enterprises. Typically, by using automated testing, an expedition of the process of software validation can be achieved along with achieving increased test coverage.

However, there are a lot of challenges in applying test automation for applications under test (AUT) which need a careful follow-up process to achieve successful test automation implementation.

1. Lack of Proper communication & collaboration between Developer and QA teams: 

Lack of proper interaction and collaboration between developers, QA automation engineers, and operations teams does not signify test automation success.

Hence, it is essential to place the entire team members to get involved in identifying test automation objectives and setting targets.

They also need to spend significant efforts on proper communication between teams to have a clear understanding of the requirements and project specifications to ensure test automation success.

2. Proper Selection of Right Test Automation Tool:

With the availability of a variety of automation testing tools for both open source and paid tools, it is necessary to evaluate properly before adopting a tool. A proper in-depth evaluation of the application under test (AUT) is required.

It should be carefully done and then the tool that appropriately matches the AUT should be chosen.

To overcome it, an expert QA test automation engineer can prove helpful to evaluate the tools based on the application that has to be tested.

3. Lack of Highly Skilled Test Automation Experts:

It is a truth that test automation requires efficient and industry rich technical skills to accurately design and maintain test automation framework and test scripts.

The team should properly build test scripts and maintain them to effectively run test scripts to verify the application performance and further resolve technical issues.

In order to overcome it, automated testing resource(s) should have a strong knowledge of the Test Automation framework’s design and implementation aspects to ensure effective automation is achieved.

4. Involves High Initial Investment Costs:

It is also a known fact that the initial phase of test automation is usually expensive as it is necessary to analyze, design and build a automation testing framework, libraries or reusable functions through a thorough analysis of the AUT.

Further, if a licensed test automation tool is selected, then the operating cost should be evaluated.

Else, if free open-source tools are chosen then also significant efforts should be spent on learning, training and maintaining them.

Hence based on the AUT priority and cost capability available therein, either open source or licensed tools should be selected.

5. Challenges with Scaling Test environments:

This is an important challenge today as QA teams that don’t provision test environments in the cloud, continue to face scalability challenges when they introduce test automation.

It is necessary to rapidly provision the different test environments that automated testing requires, scale them up, run the tests, tear them down, to ensure success while testing in the cloud.

The in-house (on-premise) teams usually have a limited number of test environments they can use, which means fewer tests they can deploy at any given time.

As a result, testing takes a much longer time. In order to overcome this, it is essential to move test environments to the cloud to scale the test automation and it will also reduce QA teams operating costs.

Automation Testing Vs Unit Testing

Why Should You Leverage Next-gen Testing Services Provider for Test Automation?

Test automation is nowadays dominating in the Agile and DevOps adoptions. Test automation enables tremendous benefits to enterprises as it ensures faster releases, quality software and also delivers a quicker time to market.

But, in order to achieve successful test automation for all critical projects, it is essential to leverage next-gen automation testing services providers as they use a balanced test automation approach to achieve quality products.

Some of the Highlights of the Approach they perform are:

– Assessment of your automation needs and application landscape

– Assessment of your existing automation solution

– Tool selection, Proof of Concept and implementation

– Automated test script creation and execution

– Creation of regression test suites with flexible execution options

– Training and handover of automation test pack to client for future maintenance

Moreover, with the huge number of benefits with automation testing services, it is time for enterprises to adopt test automation initiatives using either open source or the licensed automation testing tools.

TestingXperts has developed an extensible test automation framework, ‘Tx-Automate’, which is modular, reusable, integrated and compatible.

The framework has best-in-class features for test automation including rich custom reporting metrics, third party integrations, configurable execution options, etc.

The framework helps configure/ create test suites by combining various automated tests and making those test suites available for execution.

Get in touch with our team to discuss further

The post A Beginner’s Guide to Test Automation 2023 first appeared on TestingXperts.

At the face of it, automation of acceptance testing is a compelling idea but watch out for the caution-areas lying on some fringes

Contents 1. Automated Testing Importance 2. Challenges of Automated Testing 3. Conclusion

Automated Testing Importance

Automated tests have defined new frontiers of speed and velocity while bringing quality-related relief for software requirements. They are especially useful when the pace of development needs these aspects:

– Super-fast cycles – The GTM (Go-to-Market) window can be suitably reduced – Continuous delivery is relevant – Automation can eke out shrinkage of feedback loops – Impact of comprehensive-requirement-validation is high

Software release cycles assume a different momentum altogether when automated tests come into play. The ‘Acceptance’ component is a crucial one in testing so automating that transpires into a new level of speed and traction for quick apps that an organization wants to dish out in today’s dynamic business environments. That comes in very handy when an enterprise is keen and hungry enough to quickly deliver a good idea to its users. More so, as testing has ceased to be a time-guzzler in Agile SDLC and DevOps environments. Automated testing enables simultaneous development, integration, testing and deployment of code.

But such gains are not directly amenable here as some pitfalls have to be taken into account before it’s too late:

Challenges of Automated Testing

1. Precision of test goals and test target can never be footnotes for any test, and that applies all the more for automated tests.

The capacity of testing environments available is quite crucial in determining the success of these tests, so too many of these tests where the environment is not sufficient or not provisioned smartly, would be a no-go zone. Do ensure that test-results analysis catches up in time with the pace of the rapid continuous test. No matter how much an automated test serves your thrill, intention and time-crunch; make sure that real and rigorous testing is not sidelined in this choice. And that these brilliant time-saving tests are not brittle when they run. Leverage automated software testing services to ensure that your web applications works effectively without any security issues .

The post Automated Testing: Challenges worth Accepting and Testing first appeared on TestingXperts.

Enterprises these days are facing challenges with rapidly changing market dynamics, increased customer expectations, and frequent technology upgrades. These changes have compelled more and more enterprises to move towards the agile lifecycle model. Agile is an iterative approach to software delivery where software is built incrementally in multiple cycles rather than trying to deliver it all at once in the end. There are multiple tools available in the market to make the adoption of agile easier. ‘HP LeanFT’ is one such tool that helps in achieving this goal.

Contents

What is LeanFT

LeanFT is the most recent functional testing solution for continuous testing and continuous integration. Having a closer look at the market opportunity, and with Agile, Continuous integration and delivery gaining popularity, HP was dead right in releasing LeanFT.

Thus, let’s understand what’s different with LeanFT.

LeanFT offers Application Models

An application model is a chain of test objects that is related to the real objects in your application under test. Application model allows you to maintain your tests in a single location to be used across the testing suite. It comes with impressive features such as Tags, Search and Locate using object identification center that is accessible while managing large scale application models. LeanFT allows the users to use application models both in Visual Studio for your C# tests and in Eclipse for Java tests.

LeanFT offer excellent methods for verifying application behavior. LeanFT verify class, VerifyImageExists, and VerifyImageMatch methods help in checking appearance and behavior of your application. This is phenomenal as it lets you perform frontier-style verifications to check whether your application performs as you want it to.

Main advantages of HP LeanFT are:

• Lower Costs – LeanFT is a plugin for IDEs like Microsoft Visual Studio and Eclipse. If a user is already using HP UFT and is moving towards DevOps, they can get LeanFT for free.

• Quicker Test Creation – HP LeanFT is compatible with Eclipse and Visual Studio and also helps you write and maintain your tests rapidly. Since it uses the concepts and features of HP UFT; it is easier for users who want to use it right away.

• Extraordinary Predictability – LeanFT targets better alignment and collaboration between automation engineers and developers by using the renowned CI/CD tools which can integrate straight into LeanFT.

How is LeanFT a Perfect Solution for Continuous Integration and Testing?

Resistant and Robust Tests Applications that have a tendency to change rapidly pose unique challenges for testing. The object identification tools in LeanFT help in maintaining uniformity of testing models throughout, by adapting to changes in the original application.

Compatible with Different Operating Systems LeanFT’s multi-platform support lets sers design and executes tests on Mac, Windows, and Linux platforms.

Portable across various IDEs Encourages and enable developers and QA to work together in agile teams by using the same tool for development and testing. LeanFT features functional testing capabilities in Eclipse, Visual Studio, and IntelliJ, so you can achieve high productivity with software testing tools you are aware of.

End-to-end Reporting throughout the Lifecycle Users can get straight to the root of the issues with LeanFT’s detailed description of the flow of test execution that includes actionable and clear reasons for test failures at each phase.

TestingXperts can help you make an Agile shift at the basic level which is very challenging for most of the organizations. Contact us today to know more about our effectiveness in migrating to LeanFT.

The post LeanFT: A Perfect Solution Built for Continuous Testing first appeared on TestingXperts.