The software industry regularly witnesses the emergence of new trends, technologies, and approaches. And while not all of them are here to stay, some are not going anywhere. Automation testing definitely belongs to the latter group: having been known since the 1970s, automation in testing has only gotten more common and more powerful.
But is automation needed on every software testing project? How to plan and set up an automation project to benefit from it the most? And why can automation projects fail? These are just some of the questions we’ll answer in today’s longread.
AI development is a highly debated topic. Some people have serious concerns about it, while others are excited about the thrilling opportunities it offers. Anyway, AI technologies have already been incorporated across different fields and started to transform them. Quality insurance is no exception.
Currently, there are a lot of AI-based testing tools on the market. How can they help you? Which one to choose? If you do not know the answers to these questions, stick around. We have selected the top 5 AI-based automation testing tools, taking into account the opinions of some experts represented in the list of top software testing companies.
There’s a lot of buzz around test automation, and organizations are making hefty investments to leverage the benefits of test automation. Test automation can be referred to as the process of using software tools to automate the execution of tests, the comparison of actual results with expected results, and the reporting of discrepancies/errors. One of the primary reasons to implement test automation is to reduce manual efforts and associated risk while testing repetitive tasks, which are often mundane and time-consuming. Additionally, test automation has a wide range of advantages that helps organizations in achieving higher ROI metrics.
The use of test automation has grown in popularity over the years, as it provides many benefits to software development teams. However, there are also some disadvantages to using test automation. In this article, we will explore both the advantages and disadvantages of test automation.
For over two decades, test automation has been helping software development teams reduce the workload and hence, the strain on time and resources teams experience, especially when in a release frenzy. Automated testing not only helps speed up the testing and feedback loops but also boosts ROI from testing and thus bringing cost savings for the company.
24% of internet survey respondents claim to have seen a return on their investment in test automation within the first six months. Test automation is a starting point if your business is undergoing a digital transformation/modernization effort.
Software development is a complex process requiring rigorous testing to ensure the final product meets the expected quality standards. Testing software manually is a time-consuming and error-prone process that can significantly slow down the development process. Test automation is a valuable tool to help streamline the testing process and ensure that the software meets the quality standards before release.
What Is Test Automation?
Test automation uses software tools to control the execution of tests, comparing the actual results with the expected results. It involves the creation of automated scripts and the use of specialized software tools to execute those scripts. Test automation can be used to automate various types of tests, including unit testing, integration testing, functional testing, and regression testing.
It’s not unlikely for your team to be tempted by automation for the wrong reasons. If they are the only structure the QA team can justify the hassle with, you probably don’t really need it.
Develop as a tester. Team members that want to grow as specialists deserve all the praise, but automation for the sake of it is not necessarily the answer. Automated tests are just one of the tools that help them find as many bugs as possible in the least amount of time.
Enterprises today look at a feature delivery schedule of 2-3 days or even on the same day, from wanting delivery within a year, a month, or a week. The advent of software automated testing and its use in conjunction with manual testing has enabled project managers to stick to the needed delivery time frame.
A timely software test catches the problem, rectifying it before the feature reaches the user. Software testing is one of the most active discussions while the software is designed to provide ease to its users and is an integral part of software development.
Despite much progress in the testing framework space, creating automated tests can still require a significant amount of prerequisite coding knowledge. Automated testing solutions, particularly those based in the cloud, offer unique opportunities for teams across an organization — including developers, testers, and non-technical stakeholders. By abstracting large parts of the intricacies involved in automated test creation, each of these roles can align their approach specific to their skillset and needs.
Dive into the fundamentals of cloud-based test automation with this Refcard focused on advantages, considerations, and prominent tools: from code-based solutions to those offering low-code functionality and advanced capabilities like intelligent test automation.
We all know that testing is a significant part of SDLC, which can be performed manually or automated. No matter which testing type we adopt, knowing where we are getting application blockers while testing is essential. Learning application blockers becomes a bit easy while manually testing an application as human touch is involved.
However, when testing an application via automation, we should explicitly adopt a strategy where we can validate whether the expected results meet the actual results or not.
Test automation has transformed significantly over the years. It has helped QA teams reduce the chances of human error to a great extent. There are plenty of tools available for test automation, but identifying the right automation testing tool has always been a priority for an automation testing plan to be a success. Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, and neural networks are the trending topics of discussion in the tech world today. And, AI inevitably makes its place even in the automation testing space. The use of AI testing tools has taken over the burden of handling repetitive tasks, saving hours of work so that the team can utilize its time for performing more complex and critical tasks. It has played a prominent role in catering to the rising need to develop swiftly and smartly. Even though the current practices of continuous testing, DevOps, and Agile have kept the software development process in place, introducing AI has subtly unlocked the true potential of software testing and driven a path to Continuous Test Automation.
What Is AI Automation Testing?
AI, in simple terms, is the ability of a computer program or a computer to think and learn like a human being, i.e., the capability of a machine to reason itself — learn, modify data and use it in a beneficial way to handle any future scenarios. It applies reasoning and problem solving to automate the testing process.
By now hopefully all of us, developers, have embraced unit testing. Good test coverage of our codebase, combined with that green checkmark after running the tests, gives us a warm fuzzy feeling that everything is in order. While we all like that warm fuzzy feeling, writing tests usually requires some plumbing. This is the "boring part", where you create your test objects and manually set them up with dummy data. Oftentimes the values themselves don't even matter. A typical example of this is testing "converter" logic. For example, we might be converting a JPA entity to a DTO, or a JAXB class to something else. Such a test might look something like this:
Java
@Test
void verifyCustomer() {
Customer customer = new Customer();
customer.setFirstName("John");
customer.setLastName("Doe");
customer.setAddress(new Address("123 Main St", "Seattle", "US"));
customer.setPhoneNumbers(List.of(
new Phone(PhoneType.HOME, "+1", "123-44-55"),
new Phone(PhoneType.WORK, "+1", "555-77-88")));
// ... etc
CustomerDTO customerDto = customerMapper.toDto(customer);
assertThat(customerDto.getFirstName()).isEqualTo(customer.getFirstName());
assertThat(customerDto.getLastName()).isEqualTo(customer.getLastName());
// ... etc
}
As more and more companies focus on making their apps accessible, a question that often comes up is "How do we make sure we don't let things slip?" We've done all this work to remediate our app, but how do we make sure we don't dig ourselves back into a hole six months later and end up in a similar situation that we are in now? How do we keep things accessible?
There are a few solutions. The first is education and training. Everyone in the company needs to be an accessibility advocate and understand accessibility best practices. The second is better organizational processes. Companies should include accessibility audits in natural checkpoints throughout the software development lifecycle, like when UX provides design mockups to the engineering team or when the engineering team is code complete on a new feature. The third is automated testing, and that's what I'd like to focus on today.
The software testing space saw a paradigm shift in testing methodologies from manual to test automation with the new technologies. Digitization certainly comes with benefits, such as increased productivity; at the same time, it also results in the complexity of applications. Fintech applications are the best examples of banking services to complex app-based applications. The challenge is to provide the most satisfactory customer experience on these applications and perform well. Software testing is the game-changer and will play a vital role in this fast-paced DevOps world. It would be difficult for organizations to retain the best possible customer experience while delivering faster products to the market with traditional test automation approaches.
Let's understand more about test automation and how it is inadequate in handling new age practices and customer expectations.
In 1870, the German chemist Erich von Wolf was investigating the amount of iron in spinach. When writing down his findings in his notebook, he misplaced a decimal point, changing the iron content in spinach ten times more than in reality. While Mr. von Wolf found out that there are just 3.5 milligrams of iron in a 100g serving of spinach, the published number became 35 milligrams thanks to his mistake. This caused the well-known misconception that iron is exceptionally high in spinach, which makes the body stronger.
Though Mr. von Wolf's error was detected and fixed 67 years later when someone re-checked his results, spinach is still popularly thought to be one of the most iron-rich vegetables, probably due to the popular cartoon character Popeye.
There are principles and there are practices. A principle is a universal truth that is applicable everywhere. A practice is a specific implementation of a principle and can vary based on the situation.
Understanding the difference between the two is an important step in becoming wise. When you understand the principle behind the practice, you understand why we do the things we do. You understand the rules and also when to break the rules. Understanding the principle behind the practice helps you to be more flexible and apply good judgment in your day-to-day decisions.
Insomnia is a desktop app from Kong that’s great for building, debugging, and testing backend APIs. While ad hoc manual testing is nice, wouldn’t it be even better to include our API tests in our continuous integration (CI) pipelines? With Inso, Kong Insomnia’s CLI tool, we can!
Inso allows you to run your automated API tests directly from the command line, which means setting up a workflow with GitHub Actions is a snap.
Have you ever been asked for credentials while accessing a website on a browser? Let us understand why we are asked to fill up the credentials while accessing a few websites. This article mainly focuses on the introduction to authentication pop-ups on the website and the different ways to handle them using Selenium. Before we dive in deep and see how to handle login pop-ups in Selenium WebDriver, let us first take a look at how the authentication pop-up looks on a website.
Let us navigate to a sample website. While accessing the website, the user would be prompted with a login pop-up. The user has to enter the username and password to further navigate the site. Below is the screenshot of the authentication pop-up prompted on the website.
Does your team have the resources to build a test automation framework from the ground up with open-source libraries? Or is a pre-built and comprehensive testing tool more preferable to speed up your software development test cycle (STLC)?
Knowing which suits your scenario most will make the tool selection process much more accurate, along with this list of the top 10 free and open-source testing tools, frameworks, and libraries.
