Tips To Started With Automated Testing

Developers as well as testers must be aware of the fact that automated testing is beneficial in various ways. And choosing to use the best practices in your automated testing ensures that your app will be successful and help you to get the maximum returns on investments. We have always discussed the benefits of software testing of an application and how it is helpful in the long run. Automated testing helps to reduce the development cycles, avoid any repetitive tasks and help improve the software quality.

But the point is how to get started with automated testing. Here in this article, we will discuss some of the best practices that are strong foundations to start improving the quality of your software.

Thorough testing is imperative for the success of a software product and if there are errors and it doesn’t work properly, then chances are high that most people won’t use it. Testing the application to find defects is a time consuming process, but with automated testing, in which software tools are used to run repetitive, data intensive tests automatically helps to improve the software quality. So here is how you can start.

The first and the most important thing is to determine the test cases that need to be automated. The benefits of automation testing are linked to how many times the tests can be repeated and whether it is better than manual testing or not. Good test cases include the ones that need huge amounts of data and are run frequently to perform the same action.

Selecting the right automated tool that suits your overall needs is essential as there are lots of tools available in the market. So for this, consider these few key points:

The automated testing tool that you have selected should support record and playback test creation and features for implementing checkpoints to verify databases, key functional values of the application.

• Support various platforms and technologies: If you are testing C#, .Net or WPF apps or you are working on iOS or Android, then the tool should support both the operating systems.
• Automated tests: Your testing tool should be able to create automated tests that are maintainable, reusable and resistant to the changes in the application’s UI.
• Create high quality test data: Test data is very useful for data driven testing and the data that is used to enter the input fields is usually stored in an external file. Such data are read from a database or any other sources like text or XML files, database tables, excel sheets. A good automated testing tool understands the content of the data files and works on it.

Using external data helps to make the tests reusable and easy to maintain and also allows adding different testing scenarios that can be easily extended without requiring editing the actual automated test.

The creation of different tests usually depends on the skills of QA engineers and so it is important to identify the skills and experience of the team members and divide the testing efforts accordingly. Your QA engineers should have in-depth knowledge of scripting languages provided by the automated testing tool.