The traditional method where a human will be sitting in front of a computer and executing the test cases one by one carefully without any bug and submitting the report is known as manual testing.
Manual testing has been overcome by the latest innovation and technology where an automation tool is used to test your test cases and execute your report accurately which is automation testing.
Why Automated Testing?
Most people move towards automation testing because of time and money consuming. When it comes to the testing multilingual site manually it becomes very difficult.
Automation testing doesn’t include human interaction so it can be run at any point time once it is scheduled. It also increases the speed of executing the test cases.
Manual testing will throw a lot of error and rectifying it manually will become a headache for the testers, whereas in automation testing will be executed once the plan is predefined.
Automation testing steps
- Test Tool Selection
- Define the Scope of Automation
- Planning, Designing, and Developing
- Test Execution
- Maintenance
Below are the automation testing steps which are briefly explained
Test Tool Selection
Selection of a testing tool majorly depends on the technology that the application has been developed. For example, the Quick Test Professional doesn’t support Informatica. So it’s better to go with an analysis of which testing tool will suit for which application.
Define the Scope of Automation
The scope of automation is an important part where your application will be automated. Some of the scopes of automation are:
- Features for business
- Large amount of data
- Common functionalities
- Technical related feasibility
- Complexity of test cases
Planning, Designing, and Developing
During this phase, you have to identify a plan, design, and develop an idea for the automation, which few are listed below:
- Select your automation tool
- Design your framework and its feature
- In-scope and out-of-scope of automation
- Schedule and timeline of execution and scripting
- Delivery of automation testing
Test Execution
This phase includes the execution of automation script at first the script needs input test data to run the test. Once the test input is provided the automation can be executed directly or through test management tools which will invoke the automation tool.
Example: Quality center is one of the Test Management tools which will invoke QTP for execution of automation scripts. Scripts can be executed with the help of a single machine or group of machines. The execution can be done during the night, to save time.
Maintenance
As new functionalities have been added to the system under test with successive cycles, Automation Scripts need to be added, reviewed and maintained for each release cycle. Maintenance has become necessary for improvement in the effectiveness of Automation Scripts.
Choosing an automation tool
Selecting the apt tool for the testing will be a difficult task. Following are certain things to look for while selecting an automation tool:
- Environment Support
- Support multiple testing frameworks
- Minimal training cost
- Error recovery testing
- Object identification
- Scripting language used
benefits of automation testing
The major benefits of shifting towards automation testing are:
- 70% faster than manual testing
- Improves accuracy
- High speed in executing the test cases
- Saves time and cost
- Increase efficiency
Conclusion
The perfect selection of automation tool, testing process, and team, are an important key for automation to be successful. Automation and manual methods go hand-in-hand for successful testing.