Every software product today is expected to be of high quality, offer advanced features and functionality, and deliver a seamless user experience. Yet, many are found to have defects because of the dependence on manual testing processes or a poor approach to test automation. If you want to ensure efficient testing outcomes and expand your test coverage, you need to be aware of certain test automation best practices.
The Need for Test Automation
As software products get increasingly complex, manual testing processes cannot keep up. Not only are they error-prone and time-consuming, but they also allow testing teams to respond quickly to changes. In today’s dynamic era, embracing test automation software is the only way to enhance the efficiency, effectiveness, and coverage of software testing.
Unlike manual testing, where testers have to constantly flip through application screens, use various input combinations, record observations, and compare results to expected behavior, automated testing streamlines all these processes. Using a single tool, teams can run automated tests across multiple operating environments and hardware configurations. They can also enable faster debugging by running automated tests in a continuous pipeline.
Offering the ability to playback pre-recorded and pre-defined actions, a test automation tool can compare results and report the success or failure of tests to a test engineer. Once automated tests are created, they can easily be repeated (and extended) for quicker outcomes. Such reusability goes a long way in reducing the strain on testers while also optimizing overall testing time and costs.
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Tips for Improving Test Automation Outcomes
Test automation has long been considered critical for the success of any software product. By eliminating manual processes, test automation helps streamline the testing process. It also improves the quality, reliability, and functionality of the software under test. Because teams are free from carrying out repetitive tasks, test automation also empowers them to focus on more strategic aspects of testing – like building better testing strategies.
But just embracing any test automation tool is not going to help you reap its benefits. There are several tips that testing teams have to keep in mind as they embark on the test automation journey. Let’s look at six ways in which you can improve test automation outcomes:
1. Have Clarity on What Tests to Automate
Test automation can lead to several benefits, including better code quality, improved team efficiency, and quicker time-to-market. But that doesn’t mean you have to automate every test. When you build a test automation strategy, make sure to narrow down which tests will benefit the most from automation. Focus on tests that have vast amounts of data, are prone to error, require repetitive action, extend across multiple builds, or use different platforms and OS configurations to run.
2. Ensure Early and Frequent Testing
To get the most out of test automation, start testing early in the lifecycle. By doing so, you can start detecting bugs as they appear. Also, you can resolve them before they begin to impact quality. Needless to say, taking such an approach saves a substantial amount of time and money that would have to be spent on fixing bugs later in the development lifecycle or, worse still, in production.
3. Choose the Right Testing Framework
The testing framework you choose plays a big role in the success of your test automation efforts while reducing maintenance costs and providing a higher ROI for QA teams looking to optimize their agile testing processes. Therefore, make sure to have a deep understanding of your testing needs. Accordingly, choose your coding standards, data handling methods, object repositories, and more – for maximum test coverage and efficiency.
4. Conduct Real-World Testing
No matter what product or application you are testing, it must be tested on real devices and browsers. With every software expected to work seamlessly on multiple device-browser-OS combinations, your product under test must be optimized for different configurations and screen resolutions. While enabling test automation, ensure to test your software on real devices and check for their performance in real-world conditions like low battery, incoming calls, weak network strength, and more.
5. Invest in the Right Tool
With so many test automation tools available in the market today, choosing the right tool can be extremely overwhelming. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Here are a few capabilities to look for:
- Cloud-enabled, so you can enjoy a high level of flexibility and scalability across your testing journey
- Low-code, so you can quickly spin up new test suites and test cases as and when the need arises
- Multi-channel, so you can use a single platform to enable full-stack automation and connect all your testing needs across web, mobile, API, and desktop
- AI-powered, so you can leverage intelligent and intuitive capabilities to stay ahead of rapid changes and iterations
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6. Enable Reporting
Test automation doesn’t just help in eliminating manual testing tasks. It should also serve to reduce the amount of time QA teams spend verifying test results.Therefore, while enabling test automation, ensure adequate reporting infrastructure to generate detailed and high-quality reports for every test and after each cycle.
Driving Test Automation Excellence with ACCELQ
As an AI-powered, codeless, cloud-based test automation solution, ACCELQ is all testing teams need to drive test automation excellence. Offering a unified platform, ACCELQ enables seamless multi-channel and multi-device automation across the enterprise stack. It also delivers exceptional results across web, API, desktop, and mobile testing and takes a revolutionary approach to business assurance in a multi-cloud packaged environment.
Using ACCELQ, you can take a unified approach to test design and enable robust change management for accelerated quality. The platform allows you to achieve comprehensive and continuous testing via business process-focused automation – with little or no coding. Being highly intuitive and scalable, the tool is powerful enough to handle real-world testing complexities.
