Forem: shrutiawake

Software Test Automation : What To Expect In The Near Future

shrutiawake — Wed, 14 Aug 2019 18:33:54 +0000

Though there are a lot of companies that want to move to test automation, the fact is that a majority of organizations still don’t have test automation in place. Due to insufficient testing, companies find themselves spending a lot of time prioritizing and fixing new issues as and when they are reported by customers.

Organizations need to understand the importance of test automation today. When companies realize they need to invest in test automation to keep up with the quality of their product, the main concern is that they do not want to compromise the timelines of their release cycle. They want to analyze the cost of setup and execution of test automation and figure out if there will be any return on investment in the long run.

Today, more than ever, companies need to keep crunching out new features and most of the times, before the competitor, which means they can’t risk spending a lot of time on following all the detailed testing procedures every single time there is a release.

So, in the future, it is not only the organizations that need to adapt a test automation solution fit for the requirements but the test automation tools too need to be developed keeping the ROI in mind.

There are 2 things for sure that need to be handled in the future in terms of test automation:

Increasing the automation test coverage as much as possible
Making test automation less complicated and time-consuming

Let’s see below how different aspects of testing are going to change in the future:
Exploratory Testing
Exploratory testing, as the name suggests, is the testing methodology where the tester is free to test the software. This type of testing is less time-consuming and hence fit for the current accelerated delivery cycles compared to traditional testing approaches.

The advantages of performing Exploratory Testing are:

Valuable time is not spent on documentation of the features and test cases
More time can be spent on test automation and automating those areas that can possibly recur
Only the features that are not automated yet need to be tested via exploratory testing Thus, the future of test automation where most of the test cases will be automated also means that any features that are pending automation can be tested via exploratory testing.

Cloud Infrastructure
At present, Cloud Computing is a trend that is being rapidly adopted and companies prefer using the cloud. A few major advantages include:
The option of adding or removing infrastructure as needed
No extra investment needed for hosting or physical space
No overhead of maintenance of software and hardware
24/7 access to the infrastructure
Reduces the time needed for infrastructure setup on the premises
Refer Benefits of Cloud-based Automated Testing Tools for a detailed discussion on the benefits of Cloud-based testing.

In the future, like other services, test automation will be hosted on the cloud and the cloud infrastructure will be used for execution and reporting of the test results.

Continuous Testing
Continuous Testing aims to provide business risk feedback in terms of quality as quickly as possible such that the fate of a release could be decided. This testing is supposed to happen with each new change or build and can be integrated with CI/CD tools.
Automation can be scheduled to be executed after every build compilation and test reports can be sent after every build.

Thus, in the future, releasing builds will be easier with feedback available after every new check-in which will be enabled by the help of continuous testing.

In-sprint Automation
At present, 70% of organizations have adopted agile and the trend is only expected to grow because of the way Agile guarantees focus on both the speedy delivery and quality for every release.

Some companies use agile and scrum methodology but they keep the testing activities for the features developed in one sprint for the next sprint. To make testing and automation faster and efficient, the better approach will be to aim for testing and automation in the same sprint.

In the future, more companies are expected to adapt in-sprint test automation and move towards a product with high automation coverage.

Crowdsourcing
The new method of testing that is gaining traction rapidly is Crowdsourced testing where only a team may not be required to have all the tools and skills for testing but the testing will be distributed according to the skills and tools that a tester already has.

This type of testing ensures testing that is faster and scalable because of the possibility of getting different types of testers at short notice.

In the future, Crowdsourced testing will prove to be an economical and quicker option for testing where different types of users are expected to test the product on different types of configurations and devices. This will especially be helpful for applications that need to target geographically distributed audience.

Testsigma is launching a fully integrated crowdsourced test automation platform to fine-tune the product to the best of standards. Learn more about the crowdsourced platform here.

Scriptless Test Automation
Having talked about the need for an increase in the percentage of automation and the speed of automation in the future, the present barriers that are stopping companies from adopting test automation need to be addressed.

One way to reduce the time and resources spent on the creation of automated test cases is by using scriptless test automation. Scriptless Test Automation requires a minimum learning curve and also is easier to use.

In the future, more organizations are expected to start using scriptless test automation to maximize automation coverage.

NLP
In Scriptless Test Automation, the latest entrant is NLP(Natural Language Processing). NLP aims to make automation of test cases easy where the user can just use Natural Language to write the test steps. With the minimum learning curve, the user just has to use Natural Language constructs and some backend configuration and test cases are ready to be executed.

Such automation does not need any special skills and can be done by anyone including manual testers, developers or project managers. Involving more people from the organization in the test automation process also means increased test coverage and less cost for resources.

And as most of the fields are using NLP now to interact with humans, test automation industry’s future is also headed in the same direction.

AI
There is a lot of work going on in the field of artificial intelligence and software test automation industry is sure to catch up, there are now tools already on the market that are empowered by AI core that help in the creation and maintenance of automated test cases.

In the future of test automation, artificial intelligence will enable the creation of automated test cases with minimum effort and the test cases will maintain itself(self-heal) automatically.

With tools like Testsigma, future of test automation sure looks bright, because it is a complete package for anyone that is looking for a product that does not compromise on quality and still gets out in the market on time.

Testsigma has an AI core and allows test case creation in NLP. Having solved the problems of test case creation and maintenance, they also provide integration with most of the popular tools for CI/CD and reporting. Also, they provide test hosting on the cloud and a test lab on the cloud that offers a wide variety of devices and resolutions to test your applications on.

Overcoming The Ramp-up Delay, Cost and Resources Required To Automate Testing

shrutiawake — Thu, 04 Jul 2019 16:02:34 +0000

To put a system in place for Automated Testing is not just about selecting a test automation tool but also involves setting up several elements and components that contribute to a successful test automation process.

Various components that comprise a fully functional test automation system are:

Right Test Automation Framework, to reduce the scripting efforts for the automation engineer
Automation testing tool(s) to write scripts
Some machines to host the automated test cases – A dedicated machine is needed to execute the test cases which means extra cost
CI/CD system/Integrations to make sure the test cases are executed consistently when needed, mostly after a check-in
Tools to gather information about test-coverage(Test Management)and code-coverage to make sure all the written code is being executed
Integrations with Collaboration tools, Bug reporting tools etc.
Test Data Management, to increase the coverage of the tests

The Test Automation ecosystem grows complex involving multiple components associated with it. Though incremental investment could result in incremental returns, the test automation ecosystem is a necessary investment in the early stage itself.

Putting all the above components together and making sure they work as expected is not an easy task either. The various steps involved before an automation suite can become functional are:

Decide if Automation is a feasible option
Analyze the test automation tools available in the market
Determine what resources are going to be involved in automation
List down the testing matrix
Test Case Creation
Execution, Reporting and analysis of the Test Results – Integrations with other tools in the ecosystem

1. Decide if Test Automation is a feasible option

If you have very frequent releases and the testing resources are less, automation is the solution that can help save the manual testing time while the results of every test run shall be emailed after its execution. But the automation will only prove beneficial when the following conditions hold true:

There is a big set of regression test cases that need to be run quite frequently such that the cost of manual testing would exceed that of automation
The product is such that there are multiple modules that don’t get changed frequently. If a lot of changes are pushed in the product all the time then the cost of maintaining the test cases would be higher as compared to manual testing cost
A large set of test cases are automatable. Each UI element should also be considered for automation if the product/website is UI intensive.

2. Analyze the tools available in the market

This is where most of the time is spent. It is always good to do POC with multiple tools before taking the final decision.

Once it is decided that automation is a viable option, the next step is to analyze the automation tools available in the market and decide a suitable tool depending on the budget and the nature of the product. One of the factors that needs consideration is what technology the product is built in and then ease-of-use of the automation tool should be considered as well.

Having the right automation tool is the most crucial because otherwise it can land you in many problems later resulting in a lot of time spent debugging.
Check out this guide to select the right test automation tool.

Another factor that should not be missed is the skills of the existing resources which leads us to the next point.

3. Determine what resources are will be involved in Test Automation

After the test automation tool is decided, the obvious step is to decide how to go about with the automation process.

If using the test automation tool needs special skills and more resources to be hired, it would again be a time-consuming task and newly hired resources also mean more cost. If it is decided that the existing resources would be trained, it requires a bit of time and cost for training the old resources.

If at this point, the test automation tool is such that it requires minimal training for automation testers then that would be highly beneficial. If other stakeholders can also be involved in writing the test cases it directly means there is a major reduction in time and cost.

Such tools are the ones that allow for scriptless test automation solutions like Testsigma are efficient and allows the test cases to be written in simple English language using NLP and maintained by AI.

Also, along with human resources, infrastructure in the form of machines is needed that would host the test cases for execution. That again means added cost. This cost can be optimized if the infrastructure can be used as a service as well. Such services are already available in the market like AWS and Google Cloud Platform that can host your test cases and execute them at minimal costs. Saucelabs and Testsigma offer are test automation specific services that host test cases on the cloud and also provide the execution and reports.

4. List down the testing matrix

This is more like preparing a checklist of all the different environments(OS, browsers, devices) supported by your product that will have to be tested via the automation suite. It can prove very costly if you plan to buy all the supported devices. Instead, subscribing to a service that has all the devices ready for testing and integration can prove beneficial here. Again, this need is met by some tools available online like Testsigma and SauceLabs that has a variety of browsers on multiple devices ready for testing, AWS Device farm is one such similar offering.

5. Test Case Creation

This is the most time-consuming task. The time taken depends on the number and complexity of the test cases. Also depends on the chosen automation tool. The complexity of the test case creation can be reduced if an easy-to-use automation tool is chosen. For eg. if a scriptless automation tool is chosen this can help save a lot of effort and time.

6. Execution, Reporting and analysis of the Test Results

The automated test cases would not make sense if they were not integrated with the CI/CD tools and run after all major check-ins. Running them often means quicker feedback. And this can be achieved when integration with CI/CD, reporting and analysis tools is in place.

Cloud services that also offer integration with these tools can help save substantial amount of time and resources.

Thus, although test automation can prove to be a major task initially if the right test automation tool with all the essential elements discussed above is chosen, it can avoid the huge initial time, cost and resources spent to get started with automation testing.