Automated Testing Best Practices and Tips

Thorough testing is crucial to the achievement of a software product. But testing to discover flaws -- or bugs -- is time-consuming, pricey, often repetitive, and subject to human error. Automated testing, where Quality Assurance teams use software tools to run detailed, repetitive, and data-intensive tests automatically, helps teams improve application quality and take advantage of their always-limited testing tools. Test Automation tools such as TestComplete and TestLeft help teams test faster, allows them to test substantially more code, enhances test accuracy, and frees up QA engineers so they can focus on tests that require manual focus and their unique human abilities.

• Pick what Evaluation Cases to Automate

• Evaluation Ancient and Test Often

• Select the Ideal Automated Testing Tool

• Divide your Automated Testing Efforts

• Create Good, Quality Test Information

• Create Automated Tests which are Resistant to Changes in the UI

Pick What Test Cases to Automate

It's impossible to automate all testing, therefore it is important to determine what test cases should be automatic first.

The advantage of automatic testing is linked to the number of times a given test can be replicated. Tests that are only performed a few times are better left for manual testing. Fantastic test cases for automation are ones that are run frequently and require large amounts of information to perform the same action.

• You can get the most benefit out of your automatic testing efforts by automating:

• Tests that generally cause human mistakes.

• Tests that require multiple data sets.

• Often used functionality that introduces high-risk states.

• Tests that are impossible to do manually.

Tests that take a great deal of work and time when manual testing. Start out by creating an automation program. To begin with, you need to define your goal for automatic testing and determine which types of tests to automate. There are a couple of distinct types of testing, and each has its place in the testing process. For example, unit testing is utilized to check a small part of the planned application. To test a certain piece of the application's UI, you would use functional or GUI testing.

After determining your target and which types of tests to automate, you need to decide what activities your automated tests will perform. Don't just create test steps that test various areas of the application's behavior at once. Large, complicated automated tests are difficult to edit and debug. It is best to divide your tests into many logical, smaller evaluations. It makes your evaluation environment more coherent and manageable and lets you share test code, test information, and procedures. You will receive more opportunities to upgrade your automatic tests just by adding small tests that address new performance. Test the functionality of your application as you add it, instead of waiting until the entire attribute is implemented.

When creating tests, attempt to keep them small and focused on one objective. For instance, separate evaluations for read-only versus reading/write tests. This allows you to utilize these individual tests repeatedly without involving them in each automated test.

As soon as you create several simple automated tests, you can set your tests into one, larger automated test. You are able to organize automatic tests from the program's operational area, major/minor branch in the application, shared functions, or a base set of evaluation information. If an automated test refers to additional tests, you may need to create a test tree, where you are able to run tests in a specific order.

Test Early and Evaluation Often

To get the most from your automated testing, testing should be started as soon as possible and ran as often as needed. The earlier testers get involved in the entire life cycle of the project the greater, and the more you test, the more bugs you find. Automated unit testing may be implemented on day one and then you can slowly build your automated test suite. Bugs detected early are a great deal cheaper to fix than people discovered later in production or deployment.

Together with the shift left motion, programmers and innovative testers are now permitted to construct and run tests. Tools such as TestLeft enables users to run functional UI tests for desktop and web applications from inside their favorite IDEs. With support for Visual Studio and Java IDEs such as IntelliJ and Eclipse, programmers do not need to leave the comfort of the ecosystem to validate program quality - meaning teams can quickly and easily change left to deliver software faster.

Start Shifting Left and Automate now with TestLeft

Select the Right Automated Testing Tool

Selecting an automatic testing tool from any test automation guide is essential for test automation. There are a whole lot of automatic testing tools available on the market, and it is very important to pick the automated testing tool that best suits your overall requirements.

Consider these key points when choosing an automated testing tool:

Support for your platforms and technology. Are you testing .Net, C# or WPF software and on what operating systems? Are you really going to examine web applications? Do you work with Android or iOS, or can you operate with both operating systems?

Feature-rich but also easy to create automated tests. Does the automated testing tool encourage record-and-playback test development in addition to manual creation of automatic tests; does it contain attributes for implementing checkpoints to verify databases, values, or key functionality of your application?

Create automated tests that are reusable, maintainable, and immune to changes in the software UI. Will my automated tests break if my UI changes?

For detailed information regarding selecting automated testing tools for automatic testing, see Choosing Automated Testing Tools.

Normally, the production of distinct evaluations is based upon the QA engineers' ability levels. It's crucial to recognize the amount of experience and techniques for each of your team members and split your own automated testing efforts accordingly. Thus, in order to execute these jobs, you ought to have QA engineers who know the script language provided by the automatic testing tool.

Some team members might not be versed in writing automated test scripts. These QA engineers might be better at writing test cases. It's better when an automated testing tool features a way to make automated tests that do not demand in-depth knowledge of scripting languages, such as TestComplete's keyword tests feature. A keyword evaluation (also known as keyword-driven testing) is a very simple series of keywords with a predetermined action. With keyword tests, you can simulate keystrokes, click buttons, choose menu items, call object methods and properties, and perform a lot more. Keyword evaluations are often seen as an alternative to automatic test scripts. Unlike scripts, they can be readily used by technical and non-technical users and allow users of all levels to make robust and powerful automated tests.

You should also collaborate in your automated testing job together with other QA engineers in your section. Testing performed by staff is better for discovering defects and the right automatic testing tool allows you to discuss your projects with several testers.

Create Great, Quality Test Data

Good test data is very useful for data testing. The data that should be entered to input areas during an automated test is normally stored in an external file. Using external data makes your automatic tests reusable and easier to maintain. To include different testing situations, the data files can be easily extended with new information without having to edit the actual automatic evaluation.

Typically, you create evaluation data manually and then save it to the desired data storage. However, TestComplete provides you with the Information Generator which assists you in generating Table factors and Excel documents that store test data. Using this feature, you reduce the time spent on preparing test data for data-driven tests. To learn more about creating test data with TestComplete, see the Using Data Generators section in TestComplete's help.

Creating evaluation data for your automatic tests is boring, but you need to invest time and effort into creating data that are well structured. The sooner you create good-quality data, the easier it is to extend existing automated tests together with the application's development.

Produce Automated Tests That Are Allergic to Changes in the UI

Automated tests generated with keyword or scripts tests are determined by the program under evaluation. The user interface of the application may vary between builds, especially in the early phases. These changes might affect the test results, or your automated tests might no longer function with future versions of the application. The issue is automated testing tools utilize a string of properties to identify and find an item.

Sometimes a testing instrument relies on location coordinates to find the object. As an example, in the event the controller caption or its location has shifted, the automatic test will no more be able to find the object when it runs and will neglect.

To run the automatic test, you may need to replace old titles with new ones in the entire project, prior to conducting the test against the new variant of the application.

But if you give unique names for your controls, it gets your automated tests resistant to those UI changes and ensures that your automated tests operate without needing to make adjustments to the evaluation itself. This also gets rid of the automated testing instrument from relying upon location coordinates to find the control, which is less secure and breaks easily.