Before your website, software, or mobile application goes to market, you need to be certain that your product works seamlessly, smoothly, and without errors. To reach this level of flawlessness, your product needs to be tested again and again, under different scenarios. Kinks, if any, have to be found and smoothed out.
Traditionally, software QA testing was done manually, either in-house by the Quality Assurance (QA) team or by a team of outsourced QA engineers. However, QA Automated Testing Services is now taking the market by storm, and we can safely say that they are here to stay.
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What is Test Automation?
Test Automation is the process of automating the execution of tests and comparison of the results against expected outcomes. Automated tests are a code or a mini-software, often specific to each product and test case, but can also have wider applicability.
Is Automated Testing Better Than Manual Testing?
Undoubtedly, yes. Automated testing helps you achieve unimpeachable quality at the utmost speed. Automated tests can do what even a large QA team cannot (or will struggle to) achieve – simulate thousands of users simultaneously on a website, for example, or run the same test simultaneously on multiple machines with different configurations.
- It takes less time. Automated testing takes a fraction of the time taken by a human tester to run the same test. Simply put, in the time it will take a human tester to run one test scenario, the automated test will have run the same test hundreds of times. True, the initial setup is a time and cost-intensive activity– you have to carefully define test cases, framework, etc.– but once the automation testing is set up, the automated tests can be run as many times as needed, at no additional cost. Typically, test automation reduces the time taken to run repetitive manual tests by at least 50% (and up to 99%) – from weeks to mere hours.
- It is far more accurate. Testing is a highly repetitive job. Tests have to be run again and again to ensure accuracy and quality. This leaves room for human errors. Test automation eliminates human errors and returns 100% accurate results in a fraction of the time.
- It allows more tests to be run. As a consequence of the higher time efficiency and accuracy guaranteed by test automation, your product can be tested many times, for a greater number of test cases. This, in turn, will ensure the impeccable quality of the product.
- It costs far less, in the long run. If you are worried that the initial implementation of automated testing is going to cost you a fair bit, ask yourself, what would be the cost to the company if a defective product goes to market? What would be the cost of failure? In the world of software, “Fail fast, fail early” is the golden rule. The QA team simply does not have the bandwidth to run as many tests manually as they would be able to with the help of QA automation testing services. Relying entirely on manual testing may result in problems escaping detection and making their way into production. This would cost you customers, as well as time, resources, and money in rectifying the situation.QA automation testing services ensure that the manpower requirement, as well as the hours a resource will require to comprehensively test your product, are both significantly lower in the long run, thus making it the more cost-effective solution.
Impact on Quality:
Automated testing tools help QA teams:
- test faster,
- test substantially more code,
- conduct tests with 100% accuracy, and
- focus on tests that require manual attention and human skills.
More specifically, test automation tools and extensions allow the QA team to measure several code quality metrics like code coverage (the percentage of code being tested), technical debt, code semantics check, etc. These assessments are undertaken simultaneously with the execution of the automated tests as part of CI setup or DevOps workflow.
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This is made possible by the fact that the tests co-exist with the rest of the code, allowing evaluation of the quality of huge codebases by parsing the source code during the automated build phase in a matter of minutes, which is impossible in manual testing.
How to Develop a Good Test Automation Strategy?
QA automation testing services aim to empower businesses by accelerating releases, increasing testing coverage, and finding as many defects as possible before the product goes to market. This involves an array of testing and around-testing components: test automation planning, tool selection, construction/maintenance of the testing environment, implementation of the automated tests, testing data preparation, designing and maintenance of the automated test scripts, etc.
A holistic test automation strategy considers software and business requirements, development and evolution timelines, QA, and deployment processes. Typically, the automation roadmap will have the following milestones:
- Definition of the automation scope.
- Determination of the testing environment, testing tools, and test automation framework to suit the business needs.
- Planning the test data preparation, test design, and development, test maintenance, integration of test automation into CI/CD, etc.
- Aligning the automation strategy to the product evolution and specific business needs.
- Writing the automation code and verifying the scripts.
- Deploying the automated tests.
When Does QA Automation Testing Services Generate Maximum ROI?
Test automation works best and generates the maximum ROI on automation when:
- There is a high risk involved, as in business-critical test cases.
- Test cases need to be executed repeatedly.
- Test cases are too tedious and time-consuming to be executed manually.
How to Create an Automation Framework?
An automation framework is a set of guidelines to:
- maintain consistency of the automated testing;
- improve the test structuring;
- minimize code usage so that even non-technical testers can be a part of the testing process;
- improve reusability of codes.
The following are the most commonly used types of automation frameworks:
- Data-Driven Automation Framework
- Keyword Driven Automation Framework
- Modular Automation Framework
- Hybrid Automation Framework
- Behavior Driven Development Framework
- Linear Scripting Framework
Types of Tests
Depending on the product under testing, several tests can be automated.
- Unit Testing: The individual components/units of the product are tested. Considered the first level of testing, unit testing is performed during the development phase.
- Smoke Testing: Performed to determine if the deployed version is stable, smoke tests verify if the essential features of the product are functioning as expected.
- Functional Testing: Performed to evaluate whether all other functions of the product work as expected and covers UI, APIs, database, security, overall functionality.
- Integration Testing: The application modules are integrated logically and tested as a group, focusing on whether the data communication between different modules is working as expected.
- Regression Testing: Performed to confirm that recent code changes have not adversely affected any existing features.
- Others: Other tests that need to be executed, such as data-driven testing, black box testing, keyword testing, etc., can also benefit from being automated.
And that’s why Test Automation matters to you.
Remember: “Fail fast, fail early”!
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The quality of your product is your number one priority and non-negotiable. QA automation testing services will:
- get your feedback on failures much faster than manual testing,
- ensure that your website/software / mobile application is thoroughly and rigorously tested,
- give you the confidence to hit the market with a defect-free product.
