In this digital world, businesses are facing a pressure of delivering products and services ahead of competitors with competitive edge. Software that support these products and services should be continuously enhanced with new features and continuously become better by fixing bugs. Agile and DevOps have accelerated the pace of developing and delivering software, but software testing done only manual testing becomes a hurdle for businesses to achieve their goal.

Thus, Automation Testing has evolved to complement manual testing by saving time and effort on repetitive testing tasks, also an accelerator to improve overall software quality. This article focuses on helping organizations who wanted to adopt Automation Testing and looking for some tips to get the most of it.

You cannot automate a test scenario directly, you need to have effective manual test case that define a test scenario to validate a functionality against specified requirement. For those who wanted to know what an effective manual test case is, here is the answer – an effective manual test case will have test steps written clearly with an expected result.

Are you wondering how effective manual test cases help Test Automation?

Effective manual test cases help in understanding what objects should be identified and the test flow for creating an automated test. Manual test cases that are created considering good test design techniques will empower automated tests to uncover defects. Also, before you implement test automation, you should test the functionality doing manual testing with effective manual test cases and leverage those manual test cases to create automated tests. By doing so, you could rely on automation testing to find defects that are missed in manual testing.

Most organizations think Automation Testing is just for Regression Testing, where you ensure all the functionalities within a module are working same as previously in spite of a newly introduced change or enhancement in any functionality within the module. A lot of time and effort are involved in validating the impact of the change/enhancement on other functionalities that are related to changed/enhancement functionality. Regression Testing becomes a tedious activity in an agile environment where change is quite often, so doing regression testing manually is a strenuous job. Therefore, organizations adopt Test Automation to automate all their regression test suites and limit Test Automation only to regression testing.

The full potential of Automation Testing can be leveraged when it is used to automate all the repetitive tests which User Acceptance Tests or Sanity Tests or Smoke Tests can be.

Let’s consider automating User Acceptance Tests, every time a SME or a domain expert validating the functionality against the user acceptance criteria whenever there is a change is not just time and effort consuming but it limits SME or Domain Expert not focusing on other activities through which he/she could work on improve user journeys or anything else that could improve overall software deliverable.

Test Coverage is all about coverage of how much we have tested with test cases developed against functional requirements. Test Coverage helps to measure the effectiveness of testing and also monitor the quality of testing by validating whether the test cases cover all areas of functional requirements or anything that’s missing.

As said earlier, automate that’s time-consuming doing manually and this could also help in improving test efficiency. For example, if there are 100 test cases to test a login functionality and these test cases should be executed on multiple browsers, then it would be wise to automate the execution of 100 test cases in parallel across the selected browsers. Otherwise, it would become a tedious and a meaningless activity when done manually, and also there is a possibility of errors to occur when done manually by humans.

Let’s again consider “Login” functionality as an example, you have some test cases that validates the user login only with registered credentials and not with other credentials. Test Data is prepared to perform testing in both positive and negative scenarios but doing that manually takes a lot of time and it will be boring job for human. Therefore, automation testing would save all the time invested in test parameterization doing manually.

Using Test Automation for parallel execution and test parameterization enhances test coverage.

To make a job successful, you need to have the right tool to do the job. The same implies in Automation Testing world, a right automation testing tool is not just to make the test automation successful but also to get most out of test automation.

Currently, a lot of automation testing tools are available in the market which makes selecting the right tool a difficult job. Here are a few tips that can help:

• Consider interoperability, select a tool that works on all operating systems
• Consider your Agile practice, select a tool that helps you in agile development where change is constant
• Consider continuous delivery, select a tool that can be integrated with CI tools and helps in continuous testing to achieve continuous delivery

For more detailed information on choosing a right automation testing tool, please read the article https://www.clictest.com/blogs/choosing-right-tool-get-best-test-automation-practice/