Cut down Pesticide Paradox in your test automation
Let’s first see what is pesticide paradox is. I have extracted the definition and explanation from the ISTQB foundation level syllabus.
“If the same tests are repeated over and over again, eventually these tests no longer find any new defects. To detect new defects, existing tests and test data may need changing, and new tests may need to be written. (Tests are no longer effective at finding defects, just as pesticides are no longer effective at killing insects after a while.) In some cases, such as automated regression testing, the pesticide paradox has a beneficial outcome, which is the relatively low number of regression defects.”
In other words, repeating the same test over a long time would stabilize the application since we have been finding issues and fixing them for a long period of time.
This is going to be a discussion on how to reduce the pesticide paradox in test automation. In other words how to avoid running the same tests over and over again. The same test could be defined as the same functionality tested with the same data set and could be at the same time. What we are differing here is the time of execution, data set used for the execution, and finally enhancing the combinations by mainly introducing more data set to each test.
