Today automation testing is the norm of the QE industry. With the assistance from automation frameworks and testing tools, testers get to increase their productivity tremendously.
Want to start automation testing from today? This article's got you covered.
Automation testing is the practice of automating the execution of test cases through scripts and specialized tools. Instead of having a human tester manually executing test cases, these scripts and tools directly command the Application Under Test (AUT) to perform all actions needed. It frees up bandwidth for testers to focus more on more strategic activities.
Note that the concept of Automation Testing is not strictly limited to the Execution phase, although it is generally understood and accepted that automation testing means “automatically executing a test case”. Automation testing can actually be an umbrella term referring to the “automation of any testing activity across the testing life cycle”.
Check Out The Top Automated Testing Tools On The Market
Automation testing is the best way to enhance effectiveness, broaden test coverage, and improve execution speed in software testing. There are several reasons why Automation Testing is crucial:
If you're a software business or an individual working in the digital industry, investing in automation testing will surely bring immense benefits to your product development process.
The decision to automate a test case should be based on a careful consideration of the potential benefits and costs of its automation. Following test cases are ideal candidates for test automation:
It is also important to note that not all test cases are suitable for automation. Test cases for which the requirements are frequently changing and test cases executed on an ad-hoc basis should not be automated due to their unpredictable nature.
Automation testing is extremely versatile with a wide multitude of use cases:
If you don't know which test cases to start with, here are the list of popular test cases for you. They should give you a good foundation of how to approach a system as a tester.
Similar to any other testing type, you first need to decide on the approach for your automation testing project. There are usually 2 main approaches:
Here is a quick table comparing the 2 approaches:
Aspect | Test Automation Tool | Test Automation Framework |
Level of Abstraction | Offers a higher level of abstraction, allowing users to automate tests without extensive programming knowledge. | Requires a certain level of programming expertise and understanding of coding principles. |
Learning Curve | Typically has a lower learning curve, making it accessible to individuals with limited programming skills. | May have a steeper learning curve, as it requires a deeper understanding of automation principles and programming concepts. |
Customization | Provides limited customization options, as users are bound by the features provided by the tool. However, many tools do offer Scripting mode along with low-code mode to increase customization level | Offers extensive customization and flexibility, allowing users to tailor the framework to specific project needs. |
Ease of Initial Setup | Generally easier to set up, with user-friendly interfaces and wizards guiding users through the configuration process. | May involve a more complex initial setup, requiring expertise in designing and structuring the framework. |
Resource Efficiency | Tends to be more resource-efficient, making it suitable for smaller projects with limited resources. | May be resource-intensive, requiring time, effort, and expertise. |
Maintenance | Easier to maintain, as updates and changes are typically managed by the tool provider. | Requires regular maintenance |
Integration with CI/CD | Often provides built-in integration capabilities with Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) systems. | Facilitates seamless integration with CI/CD systems but may require additional configurations and setup. |
Community Support | Depending on the popularity of the tool, there may be a supportive community providing resources and assistance. | Frameworks usually have a robust community, offering resources, forums, and support for users. |
In other words:
If this is the first time you do automation testing for a certain system, you should first perform some exploratory testing to understand its features, so that you know what and where to test. There is really no rule to exploratory testing. It all depends on your intuition, domain knowledge, and experience. Target high-risk areas such as complex features with intricate workflows, recently modified code, integration points, etc. While you’re exploring, don’t forget to learn about the application structure. This should provide you with detailed information for the next step.
Check out this Venn diagram, which presents four scenarios:
Try to do exploratory testing with a purpose. Your mission is to uncover obscure bugs manually, but the path is unscripted. Approach it with a mindset of learning and experimentation, guided by heuristics.
Heuristics are mental shortcuts for solving problems quickly. In exploratory testing, consider the following:
Asking these questions helps establish a route to follow. Think of yourself as a rebel challenging the rules set by developers, but do so within a framework you define for yourself.
Only when you have understood the system ca you can start defining where to automate. Read up on available documentation, and select suitable candidates for automation. We have listed out the top test cases to automate in the sections above. Apply that to your project and list out the items to start working on. You may want to go back to the Which Test Cases You Want To Automate section. Essentially the more repetitive and predictable a test case is, the better it is as a candidate for automation.
This depends on your approach. If you go with a framework, you need the technical expertise to build the test suites and then continuously maintain them. If you go with an automation testing tools, you need some initial investment, but the ROI in the long run is significant, considering that the tool offloads a lot of the maintenance effort for the team so that they can focus on more strategic tasks.
There will be clear hardware-software specifications for any testing projects, and that includes requirements on servers, databases, OS, browsers, and any third-party tools needed to perform the test. For example, if you want to test a Login page, you need to prepare the browsers (Chrome, Safari, Edge), devices in a wide variety of versions (desktop, tablet, laptop, mobile), Operating system with suitable versions, and even suitable network conditions.
With an automation testing tool, setting up test environments is fairly straightforward. In fact, all of the infrastructure maintenance is taken care of from the vendor side, and testers only have to choose the suitable environment to run on. There are usually 3 options to choose from: run tests locally with your device being the environment itself, run tests remotely, or run on-cloud leveraging a diverse set of cloud devices. For example, here is the list of test environment options in Katalon Studio.
Now comes the fun part! It’s when you write your test scripts. If you go with a framework, you’ll need to write the script in a language of your choice. Automation frameworks generally support a wide range of languages to accommodate any testers.
For example, let's automate a simple test where we navigate to a website, search for a specific term, and verify that the results page contains the search term. Since it's web testing, we can leverage Selenium, a widely-used open-source framework for automating web browsers. We'll write it with Python. To set up Selenium, use pip install selenium to add Selenium to your Python environment:
pip install selenium
After that, make sure you download the appropriate WebDriver (e.g., ChromeDriver for Chrome). Check out the latest downloads here.
Now it's time to code:
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys
import time
# Set up the WebDriver (Chrome in this example)
driver = webdriver.Chrome(executable_path='path/to/chromedriver')
try:
# Navigate to the website
driver.get("https://ebay.com")
# Find the search input element by its name attribute
search_box = driver.find_element(By.NAME, "q")
# Enter the search term and submit
search_term = "test automation"
search_box.send_keys(search_term + Keys.RETURN)
# Wait for the results page to load
time.sleep(3)
# Verify that the results page contains the search term
assert search_term in driver.page_source
print("Test passed: Search term found in results page")
except AssertionError:
print("Test failed: Search term not found in results page")
finally:
# Close the browser
driver.quit()
Let's break down the code. We went through 5 steps:
Let's write another script in Cypress. Cypress is an open-source end-to-end testing framework specifically designed for modern web applications. It provides a fast, reliable, and effective way to write, automate, and debug tests for web applications. Install Cypress to your project with this command:
npm install cypress --save-dev
Here's the code:
// search_test_spec.js
describe('Search Test', () => {
it('should search for a term and verify results', () => {
// Navigate to the website
cy.visit('https://www.example.com')
// Find the search input element by its name attribute and type the search term
const searchTerm = 'test automation'
cy.get('input[name="q"]').type(searchTerm)
// Submit the search form
cy.get('input[name="q"]').type('{enter}')
// Verify that the results page contains the search term
cy.contains(searchTerm).should('exist')
// Print success message
cy.log('Test passed: Search term found in results page')
})
})
Code breakdown:
After that, run this command to open the Cypress Test Runner:
npx cypress open
With automation testing tools, you can have the best of both worlds. It's an entirely different story. Let's look at Katalon - a comprehensive test automation tool that is designed for both beginners and experienced testers and developers. It provides a complete solution for automating web, mobile, API, and desktop applications testing.
Here's a sneak peek at how Katalon works:
Test data management is unfortunately ignored by many testers, but it plays a crucial role in facilitating the entire testing process.
There are four main ways to judge the quality of test data:
Learn More: What is Test Data Management? TDM Best Practices
With all that ready, you can start test execution and gather results.
What elements are essential in a good report?
Read More: Steps To Build A Good Automation Test Report
Of course, automation testing is not without its challenges. There is usually some compromise to be made when you want to increase testing speed. What’s important is whether that compromise is worth it or not.
According to the State of Quality Report 2024, the most prevalent challenge to automation testing is the team's lack of skills and experience in test automation, with up to 45% of respondents agreeing, followed by 38% thinking that requirements change too often, and another 26% claiming that test maintenance is costly.
→ Download the State of Quality Report 2024 to get the latest industry insights
Here are 3 major challenges of automation testing that you may very well encounter on your automation journey, and they can totally be resolved with the right approach:
To automate, you at least need to invest into setting up the infrastructure for automation, and that can include:
The development of automation testing scripts is a challenge in itself. If you want to automate from scratch, testers must understand:
On the other hand, with an automation testing tool, these “building blocks” should come straight out-of-the-box, and testers can start testing immediately without any additional configuration. The only thing left to do is understand how to use the tool. Most of the time the complex parts of testing are already abstracted away, making it easy even for beginners to automate tests.
A lot of industries are heading towards complete automation, and software testing is no exception. With the unprecedented growth of AI tech, we can expect a future of autonomous testing, where computers take full control of the testing process, and there will be little to no need for human intervention. However, it should be noted that some types of tests, by definition, can’t be automated.
Exploratory testing is an example. Testers simply examine the system-under-test manually. They freely interact with the system in whatever ways they want, making spontaneous decisions about what to test on the fly.
Exploratory testing helps testers discover new bugs, and this is a crucial point. We can’t automate the testing of bugs whose existence we are not aware of. Certain bugs require a complex series of events and interactions to trigger, and exploratory testing gives testers the freedom to “break” the system in unexpected ways to find those bugs.
Usability testing is another. It is also a manual type where testers evaluate the more human aspects of the system, such as user satisfaction or ease of use. Usually QA teams will choose a group of participants representing the user base of their system. These “testers” will interact with the system following the instructions of the team while providing feedback on their experience.
It is always recommended to take a hybrid approach: embrace automation testing, but have a little bit of manual testing in the mix to ensure that you are not missing out on those “hidden” bugs.
To automate your testing is to continuously maintain your test scripts. Manual testing is simpler because you only have to record and manage the test results. However, with automation testing, you have a lot more items to work with:
Another challenge is inflexibility. For example, a test script is created for a button on the Login page. A code update occurs and that button ID is changed, rendering the test script invalid. Testers must now update the test script to reflect the code change. As the system grows in complexity, the effort for test script maintenance also grows accordingly. Maintaining those scripts is a challenging task by itself.
Some automation tools introduce the Self-healing mechanism to combat this issue. Essentially you have a tool that can automatically identify and fix the broken code in the test script so that testers don’t have to manually update it. This reduces the workload of the automation team significantly so that they can focus more on other high-value tasks.
Read More: Self-healing Mechanism in Katalon
Without a clear test plan and strategy, the testing process can become disorganized, resulting in the inability to identify and resolve defects in the software in a timely manner, leading to further problems down the line.
The automation testing process should be planned and executed systematically following these steps:
Read More: How To Write Automation Test Strategy? A Complete Guide For QA Teams
This understanding should include the application's functionality, behavior, and expected outcomes. The more familiar you are with the application, the easier it will be to identify which test cases are suitable for automation, especially the ones that are critical, time-consuming, and repetitive, and which test cases should be done manually.
To achieve this, you should:
Essentially, with on-cloud testing, QA teams can execute automated tests across a wide range of browsers and devices instead of investing into physical machines. This practice can bring the agility, flexibility, and cost savings needed to deliver high-quality software. Cloud testing environment can accurately simulate the real-world conditions in which the application will be used, minus the cost of setting up the right hardware-software configuration.
Not just that, testers can even schedule tests to run automatically at a predetermined time, which is ideal for regression testing, saving plenty of time and effort.
Automation testing requires close collaboration between development and testing teams. Both teams must work together to ensure that the testing process is integrated into the development process, and that any issues are quickly addressed.
Recommended best practices include:
The tool should be able to support the application being tested and the testing requirements. Selecting an inappropriate tool can result in test automation failure as well as inefficient use of testing budget. Some criteria for you to consider:
A good choice is adopting software quality management platforms that integrate multiple testing functionalities (web, API, mobile) into a unified solution.
These platforms offer end-to-end capabilities from test planning to reporting, including features like requirements mapping and automation script management. By consolidating various testing tools into one platform, they streamline testing workflows and eliminate the need for managing multiple tools separately.
In conclusion, automation testing is a critical component of any software development process. It ensures the quality and reliability of applications while reducing the time and effort required to perform manual testing. With the right tools and approach, organizations can improve the speed and accuracy of their testing, catch bugs earlier in the development cycle, and ultimately deliver better products to their customers.