A few years ago, software development encountered significant challenges in achieving fast delivery as manual testing was slow and frequently caused project delays. Additionally, keeping up with agile approaches proved difficult, as it necessitated maintaining extensive test coverage within limited timeframes, complicating API testing, and leading to quality issues. This period highlighted the importance of test automation to improve speed, accuracy, and overall project efficiency.
Note: Get a comprehensive read about all types of testing!
Coming back to the present context, you might be wondering, what exactly is test automation, right? Worry not!
In this blog, I’ll guide you through everything you need to know about it and how to do it effectively.
Let’s get started!
What is Test Automation?
Test automation refers to the employment of software tools and scripts to automate test executions in the quality assurance and software development process. It allows organizations to conduct tests faster without human intervention.
It is particularly crucial in agile testing, where there are frequent releases and short sprint cycles. Each sprint in an agile project adds new features or integrates them with existing ones, necessitating regression testing to ensure all components function correctly.
Here are some of the benefits of test automation in agile projects:
- Maintains Software Stability: Test automation helps by checking the software regularly, making sure it stays reliable and works well.
- Promotes reusability: Same scripts can be run multiple times on multiple platforms and used again in the next sprints.
- Fosters Flexibility: It enables frequent software updates, supporting agile development practices that can quickly respond to feedback.
- Detects Early Bugs: Test automation lets you run tests often while you’re building software. This means you can find problems early, fix them quickly, and stay on track to finish your software on time.
Fact: When talking about test automation, hope you don’t confuse yourself with automated testing. Here’s the basic difference:
| Test Automation | Automated Testing |
|---|---|
| Focuses on automating the tracking, management, and execution of various tests. | Involves automating the specific testing use cases using automation tools and scripts. |
Both play vital roles in continuous testing, ensuring efficiency and accuracy in the software development process.
Having grasped the basics, let’s now explore why test automation is essential for your agile projects.
Why is Test Automation required?
Here are the key reasons why test automation is essential for your agile projects:
- Short release cycles: In Agile methodologies, each sprint requires delivering specific features to the customer within tight deadlines.
- Maximum test coverage: It is very important to test every feature of the application to ensure that it is working according to the defined business requirement.
- Continuous integration: It is important to automate the testing process from build deployment to reporting as it helps to share the execution results in quick timeframes.
- Quick turnaround time: It is essential for promptly providing feedback on the stability of the build, enabling the team to make informed decisions based on QA input.
- Higher ROI: It helps to reduce the manual test execution cycle timelines. Thus, resulting in increased returns.
- Maintain automated regression pack: It involves keeping a comprehensive set of automated regression tests at the product level to ensure software stability.
Happy with the reasons and ready to implement test automation in your Agile projects? Learn about the “how to do” in the next section!
How to conduct Test Automation?
Here’s the five-step approach to conducting test automation in the right way:
- Adapt changes: Understand the new enhancements or features to be implemented in every sprint and plan for the test case design or update accordingly.
- Implement changes: Implement the requested enhancements or changes and integrate the same into the existing product.
- Maintain test cases: Document the test cases for new enhancements and features based on the application. Also, conduct the impact analysis due to new enhancements and identify the regression test cases to test the impacted areas.
- Test case automation: Automate the test cases for new features or changes and integrate the same with the existing automated suite. Also, make sure that every identified defect has automated test cases.
- Automate test script execution: Execute the automated test scripts based on the identified regression scope. Test scripts will be executed based on defined execution cycles, which may be daily or weekly.
BONUS Read! Before implementing test automation, take note of these parameters: 1. Identify key functional test cases suitable for automation. 2. Prioritize functions used frequently by many users. 3. Include configuration testing with varying setups. 4. Automate test cases requiring repeated executions with different data or conditions. 5. Automate test cases to run across multiple platforms and browsers.
As we almost reach to the end of this blog, I would like to conclude with some of the automated software testing tools that can help you.
Enjoy!
Top 5 Tools for Test Automation
Here are some of the top test automation tools to guide you on your journey:
- Selenium: Automates web browsers for testing web apps on different browsers/platforms.
- Apache JMeter: An open-source tool for load testing web apps to simulate heavy user loads.
- Jenkins: An automation server for continuous testing, integration, and deployment of processes.
- Appium: An open-source tool for mobile app testing on Android, iOS, and Windows using popular languages.
- Cucumber: A Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) testing tool for writing tests in a human-readable format.
Learn how BDD promotes collaboration and ensures high-quality product delivery.
So, by understanding the importance of test automation and implementing it effectively, teams can achieve higher productivity and better outcomes in their software development endeavors.
You can now start your test automation journey swiftly with the expertise of Nitor Infotech! Also, reach out to us and write your thoughts on this blog.
