Automated Testing Transforms QA Process For The Robust Web Application!

Automated Testing is an essential part of QA process for the large and enterprise Web Applications. In this, special software tools are used to test the applications with the predefined actions. It compares the actual test result is with the expected or predicted results. Testing is one of the crucial phases during the development process as it ensures that the quality of software and verifies the requirements. In automatic testing, no intervention is done by the test engineer as the whole process is completed automatically.

Why Automated Testing?

In today’s quickly shuffling world, it is a challenge for any software company to constantly sustain and enhance the quality and proficiency of software development. Many times, testing is neglected in numerous software projects due to less time or high cost. This advance to a lack of quality, which is followed to customer unhappiness and it eventually to augmented overall project costs.

Test automation can help to enhance the software-development processes in several cases. It increases the efforts initially, but its compensation will promptly pay off.

In any case of manual or automated testing environment requires modification in the test cases over the period of time as software development progresses. It is significant to be an alert that test automation cannot cover all the cases, and such expectations are unrealistic. While proceeding with the test automation, it is important to identify which cases need to automate first and its value for the product. Test cases with extreme importance and minimum effort should be automated first. Afterward test cases with repeated use, changes, and low to moderate efforts should be set up.

Benefits of Automated Testing

The automated testing is related to great efforts on the engineer’s side initially for its development but on the later stage, it pays back in a beneficial way. Here are some of its benefits that have proven fruitful for the companies:

• Optimization of speed and efficiency

Timely release of the software is a pre-requisite of the service companies that are into the development of web applications. The automation process increases the efficiency and speed as reused modules are used for different tests. This also reduces the costs and efforts on the behalf of the service company and its test engineers respectively.

• Increase Test Coverage

The automated testing is an ingenious tool for the QA engineers as they can use it on different operating systems and web browsers with several configurations. It can be achieved by minimal changes in test scripts.

• Lesser Human Resource

Automated testing companies do need a large team of testers, but they only need a test automation engineer for writing the script and software tool to perform the tests. This will reduce the need for many test engineers doing the testing work repeatedly.

• Reduction in Expenses

The automated testing helps engineers to find the bugs at an early stage of development that helps in the reduction of the cost incurred and working hours to fix the errors. Even the scripts are reusable and can be used on different OS and browsers on varied devices.

• Enhance the Strength of Agile Development

For agile development, test automation and continuous integration are foundation stones. Agile practices always depend on quick feedback by testing each incremental change. It is not something cannot be done manually but automation permits to break the waterfall’s paradigm of “coding phase and then testing phase”. It helps to turn different phased into an integrated development cycle.

• Keep Test Engineers Motivated and Efficient

It may be the boring or frustrating to fill out the same forms with the similar data over the time. The automated testing resolves this problem. The process of setting up test cases requires identifying the different test scenarios and coding, which keeps test engineer utmost technical minds involved and dedicated to the process.

Tools Used for Automated Testing Process

The tools that are used for Automated Testing are divided into two categories, i.e. Functional Automation and Non-Functional Automation. With the usage of these tools, the automated testing process becomes easy for the test engineers.

Functional Automation Tools

• Quick Test Professional
• Coded UI
• Rational Robot
• Auto IT
• Selenium

Non-Functional Automation Tools

• Jmeter
• Load Runner
• Acunetix
• Burp Suite

Frameworks Used for Automated Testing

The frameworks used during the automation process helps the testers to automate web applications in order to give authentic and error-free results. Here are some of the useful frameworks:

• Data-Driven Automation Framework
• Modular Driven Automation Framework
• Keyword Driven Automation Framework
• Hybrid Automation Framework

For using the above frameworks, some parameters are chosen by the software test engineers to perform automated testing. These parameters include Debugging and Logging capabilities, Email notifications, Version control, Support Unattended Test Runs, Data-Driven Capabilities, etc. Even the motorized testing tools not only help to perform regression tests but also assist in product installation, defect logging, GUI Interaction, Data Setup Generation, etc.

Conclusion

It is strongly advocated to test the application when quality is behind. Test automation will significantly help in this regards. It may be costly in the initial phase; however, it will pay-off quickly in terms of workload, time and cost. In general, automated testing is quicker and low-cost compared to human testing. Additionally, it facilitates ensuring quality products, which manual testing cannot assist.