Test automation: 3 things you need to know
Test automation — using automation tools to execute test case suites — delivers numerous benefits, including greater time- and cost-efficiency, the ability to run tests unattended/overnight, and a lower risk of integration and production issues.
Particularly well suited to automation are test cases that are:
- New or modified functionalities
- Business critical
- Repetitious
- Tedious for humans to perform
- Performance sensitive
- Time consuming
It’s important to recognize that automation can’t eliminate all manual testing because automation is for testing functionality. You still want users doing hands-on testing to ensure the usability of the application.
If your organization is considering automating parts of your testing processes, here are three things to keep in mind.
1. Cost and time requirements will be lower than you think.
Many teams don’t implement test automation because they believe that it takes too much time or too many resources. While this may have been true in the earlier days of test automation, it is no longer the case with modern tools and cloud services. For example, most tools can record user interactions and then allow developers and testers to modify the results for more dynamic testing. Also, most automated build tools can now incorporate many test engines into the build process, catching issues before they are deployed, and can impact live production use.
2. There are no static inputs in the real world.
Teams that do automation testing often use static, hard-coded parameters rather than dynamic parameters. This not only misses mimicking real-world use cases; it also will not properly reflect performance and scalability metrics where caching is in use. Dynamic parameters can either be randomly generated using standard scripting languages or driven from prepared input files. The parameters also need to be as realistic as possible. The use of nonsensical values to populate text fields and simple sequential numbers for complex number fields such as phone or amount can miss validating even the minimal edge cases
It is also important to have in place a procedure to reset databases to pre-test conditions for consistent re-testing.
To view the 3rd thing you need to know, and the bottom line, read through our full article here: https://www.logic2020.com/insight/tactical/test-automation-three-things-to-know?utm_source=social&utm_medium=medium&utm_campaign=Test_Automation
