Thorough crucial testing leads to the success of the software product. It helps to find defects in your product, and you can easily fix them through automated testing. The benefits of automated testing are numerous. Adhering to these strategies will ensure that you have put best practices in place to deliver maximum return on investment.
Integrating test automation into your system will shorten your development cycles and keep off cumbersome, repetitive tasks. Automated testing reduces the issues that are unavoidable while testing manually and gives you a chance to test on multiple devices. This will help improve the software quality of the organization. Here are the main testing practices that automated testing includes.
Decide on the Test Cases to Automate
Before you begin the testing process, it’s vital to understand that automating all testing is impractical. That’s why it’s important to decide what test cases should be automated first. This will help you understand the number of times you have to repeat a specific test.
The best test cases for the automation process are frequently repeated and need a large amount of data to perform a similar action. These tests include repetitive tasks that run for multiple builds, tests that are vulnerable to human error, and tests that require a lot of data sets. Frequently used functionalities that introduce high risk should also be considered in this case.
The success of the automation process depends on careful planning and the design of the test cases to automate. It will serve as a guide for the future tasks of the software application.
Identify the Right Tools
Identifying the right automated tool is essential in integrating test automation. What is the ability of the tool to test enterprise applications? There are numerous automated tools on the market, some of which the developers claim function the same, but there are slight differences. Here, you have to choose a tool that suits the overall requirements of the process.
When selecting a tool, you have to consider the support of the platforms and the technology. You should highly consider flexibility for testers of all skill levels. The tool should be feature-rich and easy to create automated tests.
You should also consider the integration part of the tool with the existing ecosystem. Will the tool work effectively with all other tools or programs? These include the CI/CD pipelines or the test management frameworks.
Divide the Tasks
Automated testing requires a lot of coordination, and dividing the tasks will ensure that responsibility is equally shared amongst the members. The creation and division of the tasks should be based on the QA engineer’s skill levels. That includes identifying the levels of experience and skills of each group member and assigning them different tasks accordingly.
For instance, a task like writing an automated test script requires an expert with knowledge of the scripting language. That means you should assign it to QA engineers who know the script language used by the automated tool.
There are other members of the team who are not versed in writing test scripts but can write better test cases, which you should consider seriously. They should be assigned to work with an automated testing tool that has a way of creating automated tests which do not need in-depth knowledge of the scripting languages.
Create Quality Test Data
Quality test data is very crucial for data-driven testing activities. Any data entered into the input fields during the automated test should be kept in an external file. It’s then read from the databases or any other data source like XML files or database tables.
The use of external data makes automated tests easier to maintain and reusable. A great automated tool should understand the contents of the data stored on the external file. It should also iterate over the contents during automated testing.
Typically, test data is created manually and stored in the desired external storage. You can use the TestComplete with a Data Generator to create the desired Table variables and Excel files to store the test data.
Create UI Resistant Automated Tests
Creating automated tests that are resistant to changes in the UI is one of the main practices in automated testing. They are with scripts or keyword tests dependent on the application under test. Sometimes, the application’s user interface being tested may change between the different builds.
To some extent, your automated results may no longer function with future versions of the application. Automated testing tools usually use a series of properties to locate and identify a particular object. The best way to prevent the automated test from failing to find the object is by providing unique names for the controls. This will make your automated tests resistant to UI changes. Hence, you will work without having to make changes to the text itself.
Conclusion
The points described above are the best practices for successful automated testing. They will help you carry out the whole process without hassles or committing mistakes that will eventually hurt the whole process of the testing. Adapting these processes and using the TestComplete will help you improve the automated testing process and do it fast. You will also be able to save yourself from incurring extra expenses for buying new tools for the testing process.
