In modern times it is not uncommon for a couple of people, or a small group of people, to come together in the name of an idea. More often than not, such groups have the motivation, ideas, and experience to start working on a project. But often they do not have enough funding or none at all. These groups are most often called startups. In fact, they are people who hope that their product will "shoot" and develop the product, often just for an idea.
But as they develop, there is a problem with testing the product. As long as it is small and manual testing does not take much time - everything is fine. But what to do if the project has already grown to relatively large sizes and the manual testers are not able to keep up with the development process? Automated testing can solve this problem. But what is it and how is it arranged?
Test automation is the practice of running tests automatically, managing test data, and utilizing results to improve software quality. It’s primarily a quality assurance measure, but its activities involve the commitment of the entire software production team.
You can automate the test cases based on the below conditions:
In most cases, using automation is only beneficial for the above conditions, otherwise, you should continue using manual testing.
Here are some types of automated tests:In unit testing, the individual components/units of a web application are tested. In general, unit tests are written by developers, but automation testers can also write them. Unit testing of a web app is performed during the development phase. It is also considered as the first level of web app testing.
Smoke testing is performed to examine whether the deployed build is stable or not. In short, verifying the working process of essential features so that testers can proceed with further testing.
Functional testing is performed to analyze whether all the functions of your web app works as expected or not. The sections covered in functional testing involve user interface, APIs, database, security, client/server applications, and overall functionality of your website.
In integration testing, the application modules are integrated logically and then tested as a group. It focuses on verifying the data communication between different modules of your web app.
Regression testing is performed to verify that a recent change in code doesn’t affect the existing features of your web app. In simple terms, it verifies that the old code works in the same way as they were before making new changes.
Apart from the above testing types, there are some other automated tests as well that need to be executed, such as data-driven testing, black box testing, keyword testing, etc.
For performing automation tests you need to use proper frameworks. There is a huge variety of frameworks.
Most popular frameworks for automation testingSelenium is an open-source web automation tool, currently in demand, and a widely used tool in the market. It can automate across multiple OS Like Windows, Mac, and Linux and browsers like Firefox, Chrome, IE, as well as Headless Browsers.
The selenium test script can be written in programming languages like Java, C#, Python, Ruby, PHP, Perl and JavaScript. Selenium offers a record and playback features with its browser add-on Selenium IDE. The powerful Selenium WebDriver helps you create more complex and advanced automation scripts.
Watir is an open-source web automation testing too. It is pronounced as "water."
Watir supports IE on windows. Watir + WebDriver supports Firefox, Opera, and headless browser HTML Unit.
The scripting language is Ruby, but you can automate web apps developed in any language.
Using Ruby, Watir gives you features to connect with the database, read flat files, excel – important for data-driven testing. You can reusable test code that can be repeated across test scripts.
Integrates with BDD tools like RSpec, Cucumber, etc.
Capybara is a web-based test automation software that simulates scenarios for user stories and automates web application testing for behavior-driven software development. It is written in the Ruby programming language.
Capybara can mimic the actions of real users interacting with web-based applications. It can receive pages, parse the HTML and submit forms.
Capybara is very handy when testing web user interfaces and expectations are based on HTML structure. It features according to their Github readme are:
Cucumber is an open-source Behavior Driven Development (BDD) tool. Cucumber supports languages like Ruby, Java, Scala, Groovy, etc.
Drafting test scripts is a joint effort of testers, developers, and customers. Cucumber supports only the web environment. Test code is written in simple English called Gherkin. Cucumber code can be executed on different frameworks like Selenium, Ruby, etc
The focus of cucumber is the end-user experience.
WebdriverIO is an open-source testing utility for nodejs. It makes it possible to write super easy selenium tests with Javascript in your favorite BDD or TDD test framework. It basically sends requests to a Selenium server via the WebDriver Protocol and handles its response.
And so, when we learned a little bit about automated testing, we should ask a question: does an automated testing startup need?
Does an automated testing startup need?Usually, startups do not have much money even for product development. And additional expenses are not acceptable. And it may turn out that manual testing will take a lot of time and slow down the process, which will make the project even more remote from the profitability.
In this case, you can automate the part of the test cases (for example, smoke testing or regression testing). This will speed up the testing process and relieve manual testers of the load, allowing them to test new features more thoroughly.
Automated tests allow you to get the test result faster and can be configured so that they will run at a time when no one will be disturbed by this. Auto-tests can also be used to test products on different platforms (e.g. different browsers).
Another advantage of automated tests is that you do not need a large team of people. All you need is one automated test engineer and the corresponding software.
But there are disadvantages to such testing.
There are a few things that automated testing won’t do: it won’t fix specific problems that users might have. When writing and testing the scripts there are just some scenarios that are being tested, not all of them. The main purpose of automated testing is to find bugs in simple operations, e.g. to log into the app, create a new account or send an email when the password gets forgotten. That’s what automated tests do.
App crashes in specific scenarios must still be tested manually. As we know, machines are very advanced, but they are not smart, (yet!).
One other thing that automated testing won’t do is test the effective usability of the design, e.g. where the buttons are positioned, and how easy it is to actually use the app. That still has to be done by manual user-friendly tests.
The Bottom LineMany types of tests exist to help an organization to assess and improve the quality of their product. Unit and functional tests are the basic tests every product should have in place. Regression testing is the most important type of test to maintain the level of quality for your product.
Automated testing will not only reduce the testing time but also improve the life of the development team. As they will receive data on bugs and instability in the application faster.
In general - if a startup can afford to hire an automated test engineer, it should be done. This will save money and time for product development and testing in the future. But do not forget that you should not immediately try to cover the entire application with auto-tests - and you should choose only the individual parts. But when it will be possible - to increase cover.
