The value of application testing is hard to ignore in this fast-moving competitive world. Developing applications that meet top standards is vital. For that organizations require well-thought processes to ensure quality. Therefore many organizations have realized the true value of Test automation, which is quickly becoming the standard tool for testing for many organizations.
In the new fast-paced software development environments, it becomes difficult to test an application before its release thoroughly. If any defects creep in unobserved into the application, then the results can be dreadful, right from user dissatisfaction to increased maintenance costs.
For tasks that are impossible for humans to achieve manually automation makes it easy. Leveraging the machine’s power and qualified testers the team will be able to execute more tests in less time, with increased coverage. This helps in freeing human testers to do more high-level, exploratory testing.
Automation proves to be beneficial especially for test cases that are executed repeatedly, like for cross-browser and cross-device compatibility, and for full or partial regression suites.
Before we move on to our topic it is essential to know how automation adds value and solves specific needs within the organization. We will first discuss what test automation is to unlock its real value, understand why it is important, and what are its best practices to be implemented for the project to be successful. Then we will explore how test automation contributes to generating high-quality products.
Test Automation
Test automation is also known as automated testing or automated QA testing. Digital marketing is continuously evolving, pressuring organizations to deliver more value to users, faster and more efficiently than their competitors. Test Automation helps them to make the testing process continuous. When executed correctly, it reduces much of the manual requirements of the testing life cycle.
It is the practice of using special automation tools to run tests automatically, control the execution of tests, maintain test data, and analyze test results by comparing the actual outcomes with predicted outcomes. This helps to achieve improved application quality all without any human intervention.
Test automation is mainly a quality assurance measure, but its activities involve the inclusion of everyone from business analysts to developers and DevOps engineers to get the most out of it. A well-structured and comprehensive test automation strategy helps achieve results from good test automation frameworks and tools. Most importantly, it helps to get the application faster to market and ensure quality to make it market-ready.
An automated test once created can be run as many times as needed. This results in saving time, money, and effort. It also fits in with continuous testing, continuous integration (CI), and continuous delivery (CD) software development practices.
Revealing the power of automation testing
Unlocking the power of test automation depends on making the right decisions within the application life cycle to obtain most of its assets. When talking about automation testing, we refer to tools that test the application in place of real-life testers and QA engineers. It serves to increase the effectiveness of the testing process.
Test automation is vital to achieving success. Since new applications are being developed and released faster than ever before, adopting test automation becomes extremely efficient. When organizations automate repetitive tasks, manage test data, and use insights to enhance applications quality, they release a quality product
Why Test Automation is Needed
Automation, not just saves time and resources but also accelerates the process of application development. It provides scalable, reliable, faster, and efficient results with better coverage. This is done by quickly validating quality each time a change is made to the code, with the least manual intervention.
Once the automation test suite is created, it can be easily repeated and can be extended which is impossible for manual testing. Due to this, automation has become an essential key element and a reason why it is best to automate for the successful development of projects.
Implementing Test Automation with other open-source testing tools enables the testers to execute tests on different browsers, environments, and platforms. So that they no longer need to test every possibility manually at the time of each release cycle.
In this world of competition, saving time directly translates to saving costs. Automation drives a faster release cycle by introducing speed and flexibility into the application development lifecycle and automation. Not just saves time and resources but also accelerates the process of development for them, and also reduces the time significantly to run repetitive tests
It is also to keep in mind that if applied at an incorrect point in the application development life cycle, it may end up investing a huge amount without getting adequate returns for the efforts. To avoid this, it is important to know the best practices of test automation.
Below are some best practices that will help you successfully implement Test Automation in your projects to help you get started and embrace test automation accurately.
Automated Testing Best Practices
- Once the tool is chosen, test automation needs to be applied correctly based on the organization’s requirements. Adopting and maintaining automation comes with some initial challenges. However, implementing test automation best practices are vital to accomplishing success and ensuring that test cases are fully functional.
- The first is to set up the right Test Automation strategy. This means deciding what tests will be more beneficial to automate. For example, building a new product, the application has larger data sets, the application needs frequent changes, and faster time to market, then in all the above scenarios automation is required.
- Set up alerts by this you will get alerted when a test fails. This will help in deciding if you should abort the current test run or let it complete.
- New approaches in application testing suggest that testing should be planned way ahead in the development process. Therefore test early in the development life cycle. It will help build a robust automated testing framework that goes hand in hand with development.
- Determine the suitable automation testing tool as per the testing requirement. This will help in the quality of the testing. For example, functional testing may require a different tool than performance testing. Therefore choosing the right tool depends on the objective that is needed to achieve test automation.
- Once the test automation has been set up, maintaining the test cases is also very important. The existing test cases should be updated and the outdated ones should be eliminated at the end of each development cycle. An excellent level of automation testing helps improve the testing process, which results in a better quality of the application.
- Debug automated scenarios continually and test the application early and frequently this will help to identify bugs early and will be easier to fix. Because bugs found in later stages require much more effort to fix.
Every testing team and organization has unique requirements. Analyzing these practices and determining what test suite best fits the organization is important to keep in mind while implementing automation. Following the above-mentioned practices will help in increasing automation value and fastening time-to-market.
Test Automation for getting a higher-quality product
Organizations have recognized that effective test automation is the key to higher code coverage. The switching from manual testing to automated testing provides several benefits. Organizations implementing test automation can make testing processes more reliable and productive.
It helps the testers to become problem solvers instead of problem finders. This will make a significant difference in productivity, delivering high-quality results while saving time and money. Let’s determine how test automation contributes to a higher-quality product.
Test automation Increases Test Coverage
Automated application testing increases the depth and scope of tests to help improve product quality. Lengthy tests that often get avoided during manual testing can be run unattended with test automation. Thousands of different complex test cases can be executed easily during every test run on multiple devices with different configurations. This provides coverage that is impossible with manual tests.
Test automation Improves Accuracy
No QA testers can perform a controlled web application test with thousands of users manually. Even the most hardworking tester will make mistakes during monotonous manual testing. Automated testing enables them to perform the same test steps accurately every time they are executed.
It can simulate tens, hundreds, or thousands of virtual users interacting with a network, and web applications but never forget to record detailed results. This as a result improves the quality of the application under test.
Automated application testing looks inside an application and sees memory contents, data tables, file contents, and internal program states to determine that the application is behaving as expected.
Test automation enables faster feedback for overall application stability
Feedback for recently developed features improves overall application stability. Automated testing is a quicker way to get feedback on failures. It guarantees quality, and incorporating test automation brings more rapid validation in developing products by reducing the feedback cycle.
Improves application quality at every stage of development
Test automation allows a single test introduction against various devices and OS versions at a time. This helps to increase coverage and confidence in the app’s quality. organizations having clients in multiple parts of the world with different operating systems, this is a huge advantage and time saver.
Test automation identifies errors early
Test automation allows moving more tests into the build phase. Thus identifies defects or bugs earlier and faster.
Test automation enables faster delivery of new releases on a more regular basis
Identifying errors early and providing faster feedback enables the team to develop confidence in the app’s quality and produce more successful releases continually.
Eliminate human intervention
Executing repeated tests continuously can become mind-numbing. This increases the potential for human error, resulting in a buggy application. Implementing well-designed automated test cases will eliminate human mistakes.
Helps to enhance test coverage
Test automation allows developers to write more rigorous tests that assess difficult use cases. This extends the product’s test coverage which results in a higher-quality application.
Though test automation offers plenty of advantages, it offers enormous and reliable help with repetitive tasks and frees up time and effort. But it is also to remember that it can never completely replace people in terms of testing because 100 percent automation is not possible, there are cases where manual testing is preferred.
Test automation with LambdaTest
QA testing is vital to detect errors in any application. Test automation is a perfect solution for common, repetitive, and testing high-volume data sets. To deliver high-quality applications in today’s fast-paced and intensely competitive marketplace many organizations are moving towards cloud-based service. Testing on a cloud-based platform is easier since updating and maintaining the infrastructure would be taken care of by the cloud service provider.
LambdaTest’s test automation solution offers key features to build high-coverage test suites, for accessibility, usability, performance, and unit testing. It is a cloud-based platform that offers a cloud Selenium grid connected to more than 3000 real devices, browsers, and operating systems with their combination for instant, on-demand testing from anywhere across the globe at any time.
The cloud can be integrated with a variety of tools like Selenium and Cypress to help in boosting automation test coverage. It also provides integration with other popular CI/CD tools like Jira, Jenkins, TeamCity, Travis CI, and many more. Additionally, this platform has an in-built debugging tool that enables the testers to identify and resolve bugs immediately. It also facilitates instant, hassle-free parallelization for more thorough test coverage. Because more testing can be accomplished simultaneously.
Managing and coordinating tests becomes much easier with LambdaTest. As it allows the tester to track and share testing results from a particular, centralized location. It also improves the accuracy and coverage of testing for teams competing in an increasingly fast-paced software market. They just simply need to sign up and start testing on a robust Selenium grid that constantly gets updated for the best possible results.
