Five Essentials when moving to Automated Software Testing

Software testing has become an acceptable field to work in and has provided the scope to move ahead in life. In the fast-changing technology business landscape, the necessity to move from manual testing to automated testing seems to fit well. Software testing is classified into two types of testing such as manual testing and another one is Automation testing. Manual testing is a time-consuming, repetitive, and error-prone process, testers move towards implementing automated testing to reduce the time to market. As software requirements are changing more rapidly, we can’t leave manual testing completely. At first, you may get stormed with questions as how to start and where to start from. rnHere are some key notes to keep in mind to move towards automation testing: Need to have a clear set of goals and know your software wellrnTest automation is meaningless without setting a goal. The first part of developing is identifying goals that will help to measure success for a test automation strategy. You have to know every side of your software before you start automation testing and have to know the language in which the software is written. rnWhat to automate?rnFor starters, it is important to remember that automated testing is not a magic pill that can be applied in every testing situation. The following points are described below : Frequency of testing As the software is released frequently, in that case, you should automate smoke and regression testing first, as that would help to boost the testing cycles with quicker time to market with lesser manual involvement. Business and technical priority This is important, this type of testing is based on the business needs and complexity, and areas with less business priority can be removed from the automation scope. To save time and effort, automate test cases that support multiple browsers. What not to automate?rnThere are several testing techniques, if done manually then it will provide more powerful results than automated testing or cannot be done through automation testing at all. rnSome testing techniques are as follows: Exploratory testingrnIn the real world, users would rather explore the software than follow a standard workflow we intend to automate. Exploratory testing can not be automated as they may tend to follow a hay-way process which can only be achieved through the human thought processes and it is not recommended to automate exploratory testing. User experiencing testingrnThere is no automation tool that can fully capture the emotions or can measure the software on the basis of human emotions such as the likelihood of usage, eye-soothing experience, etc for the application user tend to use. In that case, they face difficulty while using the application that can only be experienced by humans rather than via a tool. Accessibility testingrnThis testing helps to evaluate how accessible your application is and this can only be done through manual testing by analyzing the experience through the workflow or application usage. How to automate?rnOne basic fundamental rule when moving to automated testing is that not all tests can be automated. So the unrealistic goal of 100% automation for your application under test is not possible, in the beginning, set a target for the portion of tests you wish to automate. Selecting the right automated testing toolrnThe ROI on automated software testing is highly tool-dependent or influenced by your choice of tool. Deciding which tool is to use for automation testing, here are a few factors: The domain for the applicationrnThe tool selection of automation tools majorly depends on your application domain. For web-UI applications, one can need tools like Selenium and QTP, and in the case of mobile applications, you can go for tools like Appium. Programming experiencernIn this, you can pick a tool as per your comfort level of the resources or one can choose from programming languages which is helpful to any tester. For example Java, javaScript, Ruby, C#, etc.