While there is no doubt that manual testing will always be around, there is an increasing need for automated testing. It brings many benefits to a dev team, like time management, broad coverage, and quick iteration of test cases.
Having a test automation checklist is the key to any successful automated testing strategy. If your product has several bugs, nobody will be using it or buying it. Here, automation testing plays an important role; the tester uses automation tools to run complex and repetitive tests automatically—test automation tools help testing teams test all cases faster with bug reports.
So, as promised, here’s a checklist to help you create efficient test automation flows.
Make a test automation plan and select a specific approach
Before starting with test automation, the testing team needs sound strategies. Here, the team should put together essential requirements related to testing cases, and define goals. How will automation fasten up the test cycle? What things do you need to make a test plan successful? Which way to choose such that test backlogs will be minimal? Answers to all those types of questions will be discussed in this stage.
It isn’t mandatory to automate all test cases; you only need to define the types of test cases to automate. After that, the testing team will finalize tailored approaches to building an automation test case. This will lead to creating multiple automation test frameworks. For example, a test automation framework for device testing may be very different from that for cloud testing or security testing.
Choose the Right Automated Testing Tool
The next step is to choose the right testing tool because everything depends on the testing tool. There are many options out there, so the tester should remember that the selected tool needs to work well with their requirements and provide accurate test results. Here are a few suggestions:
Perfecto
Perfecto is an automated testing platform for web and mobile apps. It allows you to test globally with the help of cloud computing. One of the most prominent benefits of Perfecto is that it supports many test automation frameworks like Selenium, Appium, and Espresso, among many more. Perfecto is suitable for real-time bug detection and analysis. It also supports many programming languages for automation scripts.
Functionize
Functionize is another tool for automation testing. It is an intelligent testing platform that uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies to automate the testing process. With the help of AI and ML, there is a rare chance to miss any bug. So eventually, your software can be more efficient.
Selenium Box
Selenium Box is a testing service that runs on Selenium Grid as well as on a cloud environment. Selenium Box also provides automation testing. Their primary focus is to provide fast test results for banking, medical, private corporation, or insurance industries.
Set up a Test Environment and Test Cases
A robust test environment is essential to make successful test automation flows. In this step, you need to start building your test environment and create a test script that will work with your opted tool. The testing environment is the same as development, and staging is the same as production. Try to run a simple test to check if it works well or not.
In this phase, you should create test cases according to your requirement. All test cases should be well defined and verified. Make sure you write test cases for the test and staging environment. They cover positive and negative flows as negative flows make the system more sturdy by preventing data leakages or unwanted system access. Also, consider test data, create appropriate test data to execute test cases, and store it for further use.
Execute Test Cases and Analyze Test Results
This phase depends on all your previous work. Before executing your test cases, make sure you verify all of them multiple times. Pass all your data and test cases to your tool and execute them. There’s also the CI/CD pipeline concept, where you can run test cases parallelly to save time, but make sure only to run those that have no dependencies. For example, test cases of independent dashboard pages can run parallelly.
Once all test cases are executed, you can monitor the test result. Some tools may have a nice UI to check the results for each test case. You can also review test coverage and re-run the test with different data if required. If you need to involve a developer to pass the failed test cases, then you can. After the fixes, you can recheck by executing the same test case.
Conclusion
Automation testing is more suitable for test cases that are general and need to run multiple times. It’s better to opt for personalized techniques and stick to one product.
Each software has its challenges and requirements. No two products have the same sets of testing cycles, and they may vary from one application to another, so the testing team must evaluate each thing properly.