In today’s ever-evolving digital landscape. All users must use the best practices of automation testing to ensure efficiency and quality assurance. A successful application release demands a strong testing strategy at its core.
Now that you know the need for an automation testing strategy let’s see what test automation is and what its best practices are for 2024.
What is automation testing?
Automated testing is a vital part of application development as the quality and reliability of the software are ensured, and it also saves testers time and resources. This testing technique includes tools and frameworks to execute pre-scripted tests on a software application. Automation testing excels from manual testing as it streamlines the process. It is unlike manual testing, which involves human intervention at every step.
Why is automation testing important?
- Enhance efficiency by saving time and resources.
- Ensures accuracy and consistency in results and eliminates the chance of human error.
- It is cost-effective. Although it requires investments initially, its long-term benefits outweigh the cost.
- Contributes to faster development cycles and saves time.
When to opt for automation testing?
Performing tasks manually can be time-consuming and lead to many mistakes, but when it comes to automation testing, things speed up, ensuring better accuracy. Additionally, automation testing fastens the pace of regression testing, enhancing its effectiveness. When an app requires testing across numerous setups, automated testing steps in to enhance efficiency and reduce the manual testing workload.
Best practices for test automation 2024
Testing is very expensive and takes too much of users’ time and effort. Figuring out the best practices in automation testing is helpful as it leads to a more effective testing process. This article provides several best practices to implement while establishing your test automation suite.
- Early involvement in the development lifecycle
Automation testing should be integrated in the initial stages of the development lifecycles. Testing after the development stage is over is not good. Early Involvement reduces costly bugs and increases the test coverage.
The earlier you get involved, the easier it will be to identify and rectify issues promptly.
- Decide what you need to automate
You must know clearly which test cases you must automate, as some can only be conducted with human judgment. Before test automation, try to narrow down to tests that will benefit from being automated. The following advisable qualities must be kept in mind to automate tests:
- Tests that are inclined to human error.
- Tests that focus on functions that are often used.
- More feasible, that is less complex test cases.
- Tests that are more stable as they require less maintenance.
- Test cases with higher risk for product quality and functionality.
- Start with a small set of tests
The best way to proceed with testing is by planning a testing approach, objectives, test cases, etc., starting with a small set of test cases and increasing gradually. It allows better planning and implementation.
Testing can become tedious, complicated, and unproductive if not started with a small set of tests.
- Write detailed test cases
Writing test cases in detail is very essential. Detailed test cases include all the essential information about the whole testing process. It increases the effectiveness and makes the software testing process more efficient.
Including details like test case description, test inputs, test case author, etc., in your test cases document helps your QA team stay on the same page. It also gives ideas on what test cases they need to execute.
- Keep test cases simple
Test cases must be very simple and easy to understand with a clear purpose and expected outcome. It should be. This helps in avoiding errors during test execution. When things go wrong, it is easier to debug simple cases. These are easier to modify, reuse, and maintain.
Furthermore, simple test cases help maintain a manageable test suite. Also, these cases are more scalable. By keeping it simple, you can ensure effective and efficient test automation efforts. It also provides better-quality software.
- Select the right automation testing tool
Selection of the right automation testing tool is essential as an automation tool is the key to test automation. While selecting the automation tool, consider looking at the criteria that define an ideal software and which suits you the most.
Some of the criteria that you should look for are :
- Test type and scope you are looking for
- Frequency of cases and scenarios you need to automate
- Tools that support multiple languages and platforms.
- Easy to use and maintain tools.
- Tools that streamline your test automation process.
- Cost-effective tools
While exploring tools for automation testing, some of the most popular ones that can be considered are LambdaTest, Selenium, TestNG, and Appium.
LambdaTest is an AI-powered test orchestration and execution platform. It allows its users to run both manual and automated tests at scale. The platform allows you to perform both real-time and automation testing across more than 3000 environments and real mobile devices.
One of the standout features of LambdaTest is its ability to scale testing operations. Whether manual testing is performed in real-time or automated tests running across a broad range of environments, LambdaTest provides its users with the infrastructure and resources to fulfill testing needs at scale.
- Use good-quality test data
Good test data is beneficial for data-driven testing. Data files can easily be extended with new data without editing the automated tests.
The following points should be considered while creating test data:
- Test data should cover the exceptions.
- Test data should cover boundary conditions.
- Test data should copy real-life scenarios accurately.
- Keep records for better debugging
Many times, tests fail due to some reason. The best way to overcome these problems is by identifying the exact reasons for test failure. In these cases, human efforts can make the automation testing more fruitful by screenshots or video logs of the failed testing scenario.
This speeds up the process, quickly identifies the errors, helps understand the problem, and prevents you from repeating the same mistake in the future.
- Divide your automated testing effort
Successful tests are performed if done in a team as they are very helpful in finding defects. It is very important to identify your team members’ skills and level of experience to divide your automated testing efforts. Instead of assigning all tasks to a single team member, you should divide them among several. This promotes collective ownership of the tests.
Members with relevant programming experience can create test scripts, test case creation, and test data generation, which can be assigned to members with experience testing user workflows. Similarly, different works should be assigned to different members according to their expertise.
- Set up a testing environment
Setting up a testing environment refers to creating a virtual space for conducting software tests. Setting up a test environment is essential for successful test automation, and this is where your planning starts coming into action.
Before writing test cases, best practices should be defined to confirm their resistance to automated system changes. The test environment should be the same as the stage environment, whereas the stage environment should be identical to the production environment to ensure consistency.
- Create automated tests that are invulnerable to changes in the UI
Your test data should remain unaltered when your application’s user interface changes in the early stages of development. Provide unique selectors for the web elements of your application; otherwise, it is likely to be brittle.
While designing your test automation framework, incorporate design patterns. Implementing a good design pattern helps minimize code duplication and enhances the extensibility of your code.
- Test on real devices
Testing on real devices is very efficient as developers can spot errors and fix them before launching the system. Testing should also be performed in environments with low batteries, network connections, slow internet, etc.
Testing this way enables you to find the bugs that need fixing. Running your software on a simulator or emulator is not up to mark as it cannot provide actual end-user experience.
- Do not rely entirely on test automation tools
Although automation certainly improves QA processes, relying completely on test automation tools is incorrect. Manual testing also plays a vital role in specific scenarios. Manual testing plays a crucial role in the case of complex features that require human logic and reasoning.
Automated testing will continue to be the part, but manual testing must be partially replaced.
- Analyze the test results
Identifying the test results regularly and taking corrective actions is essential. This ensures the application’s quality and the automation script’s effectiveness.
- Test script reusability
It is possible to reuse the test scripts created for automation testing. For reusing, it requires minimal or hardly any changes. Further, several QA teams can reuse these test scripts according to their project’s requirements.
Conclusion
To conclude, it is very important to know and identify the best practices and strategies that are best suited for your organization. Make sure to have good plans based on your goals. There are incredible results seen in the case of test automation if done in the right way. The practices mentioned will surely increase your team’s productivity.
Automation testing can lower costs, enhance productivity, and improve accuracy in software testing. To wrap up, never be afraid to experiment and regularly monitor and review your automation performance and quality.
