From Siri to Alexa, we are surrounded by automation, and human life is more likely to be completely dependent on automation in the coming years. Being on the other side of the technology, you must keep yourself updated if you work as a software tester or developer.
Automation testing comes with many how and why questions.
In automation testing, you must know which test you need to automate or select the appropriate tool for your automation testing. Automation testing provides you with a wide dimension to explore new opportunities in testing and product development.
What is Test Automation?
As a beginner, you need to understand the functionality of automation. Test automation uses external software outside your application to control the execution of tests automatically.
With test automation, testers can automate tasks and repeat them without manual intervention to save time. Testing tasks that are difficult or complicated to perform manually can be completed with automated testing. Test automation can speed up release cycles and assure the quality of software. Chances of human errors following test scripts are reduced.
Manual testing requires human intervention which increases the chances of mistakes and bugs.
How to choose a test automation tool?
Being a developer or tester, the most commonly asked question is, “what tool will be best for my work? Or which framework will ease my job? It would help if you considered many things before you finalized the automation tools.
Consider the things like who is writing the tests and how many tests are running. Consider the overall budget of the project when you decide to adopt the automation tools. Being a QA engineer you should select the automation tool based on the requirement like code-based or codeless. It can be open source or paid.
For a comprehensive overview of test tools see our post (TODO add link).
Benefits of Test Automation
Test automation has many benefits, some are qualitative, and others are quantitative.
- Improved test coverage
- Speedup of testing cycle
- Reusability of automated teststep snippets
- Easier regression testing
Types of Automation Testing
Here are the types of test automation required for a seamless testing process.
- Unit testing
- Smoke testing
- Black box testing
- Integration testing
- Regression testing
Components of automation testing
Here are some important components of automation testing.
- Automation unit tests
- Automated API tests
- Automated web service tests
- Automated GUI tests
Conclusion
Before jumping into test automation, understand the needs of your testing process and the company’s requirements. This beginner’s guide for test automation helps you understand the process of the right test automation tool selection. Design the tests before starting the automation.
Avoid the automation of unstable functionalities; always decide the features which you want to automate. If you’re going to leverage the test automation, then introduce the test automation in the early stage of your Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC).
