For years, software testers have been using test-automation tools to speed up the testing process and increase accuracy. However, “test automation” usually refers to automating functional tests for an application. This gives rise to another set of problems that need to be dealt with before attempting implementation: knowing what your automated system needs to do.
This article aims to help you determine if you need to use test automation at all, what kind of test automation tools are available, and which tools are the best choices for your specific application.
Effective Ways To Use Automation Testing
Test Automation tools are created to perform repetitive tasks. It saves time and resources, improves product quality, ensures consistency and stability of stacks, makes regression testing easier.
Following are some of the most effective ways in which automation testing can be used for your product:
- Identify Problem Areas And Fix Them Earlier- This is one of the biggest things that automation testing can help with. Testers might overlook some issues during manual testing because they don’t pay enough attention or are too occupied with other things. This can result in huge consequences once users start using the product resulting in mostly negative customer feedback.
- Progressive Testing- Automation tests should be written in a way that the test data is getting more complex with each iteration of testing. It helps in finding bugs at earlier stages, thus saving costs for fixing them later on and also saving resources consumed by users.
- Test Layer By Layer- One of the most effective ways to use automation tests is to test your application from different angles. Usually, developers test the main functionalities of an application but it doesn’t give a 100% coverage of all testing. Automation tools can be used to test each layer of an application regularly.
4 . Testing End-To-End- Once automation tests are written. They should be executed end-to-end on manual and automated systems. This helps in finding bugs before users do. For example, if an application’s login page is crashing, automated tests should detect it when developers are still working on it.
5 . Regression testing with each new build coming out of development, there are more chances that some defects have been introduced into the system which were not present earlier. Automation tests can be used for regression testing so that the developers tackle these bugs before releasing them to production.
6 . Parallelizing Testing-
Most of the organizations follow the Agile development model where one or more releases follow each iteration. The best way to keep pace with fast-changing requirements is automation testing which can be parallelized with iterations and releases.
- Testing Virtual Environments- Automation tests are one of the best tools for testing virtual environments regularly without disrupting the production environment or impacting performance.
8 . Test Tools- There are many automated system testing tools available to follow different software development methods. Some of them include:
- Telerik TestStudio
- Ranorex
- Spy-Runner
- Test Complete
- Test IO etc.
Before choosing a specific tool for automation testing, it is better to understand the exact requirements of your application and the team working on it. This will help find out which automated system testing tools are best suited for your product.
After your test automation tools are identified, you should choose the best tool for your product.
Final thoughts
Now that you have decided to implement test automation in software testing as part of your overall quality assurance strategy, it is important to find out what kind of testing can be automated. Once this is clear, you will need to identify the right automated system testing tools and frameworks for your product.
Finally, to be on the safe side, it is better to opt for automated system test tools and frameworks. That can be integrated with other applications such as bug tracking and defect management tools, repositories, etc. Also, it should support all major programming languages such as Java, C#, Ruby etc.