You can find ‘automation’ everywhere. The buzzword simply means replacing human activity, ‘to an extent’, with systems, devices or tools so that they can improve efficiency. One thing to remember is that time is limited and of the essence; so the very basic requirement of automation is to save the same.
Cost effectiveness and quality are equally important but one of the core benefits automation brings is in repeatability in efforts in a much faster time span.
The importance of automation can be understood by the fact that the e-commerce giant ‘Amazon’ has already been testing on delivering orders with drones, wherein the orders will be sorted by robots at the warehouse.
Starbucks too, will soon be introducing cashier free counters for mobile orders. Tech giants like Google & Facebook too are all set to come up with self-driven cars and brain based computer interfaces respectively. This clearly showcases the reality around the importance of software automation and specifically in quality engineering, software test automation.
So, if you are completely new to automation testing tools and test automation services, you would probably be struggling around questions such as:
Which tool or framework should I choose for automation?
Which tests should I automate?
The IT industry is overwhelmed with open source automation tools, which gives you ample options to pick from.
The goal of software test automation is to test and compare the projected output with the actual output. The test is initiated by creating test scripts using automation testing tools of choice. These tools can be chosen from a set of widely available open source tools such as Selenium, JMeter, Appium and more. The software test automation is then used to automate the repetitive tasks which are otherwise difficult to perform manually.
While this has traditionally been the core workflow of an test automation effort, today it has become more sophisticated and valuable. Automation frameworks, not just tools are becoming important, where quality engineers design and implement them to be used not just by testing teams; but also by developers, to promote continuous quality in a CI/CD cycle.
Which Tool to Choose?
It strictly depends upon the usage and your requirements. Before selecting a tool for software automation testing, you might want to consider some basic questions:
- Who is writing the tests?
- What type of test is it?
- If you’re using a paid tool, does your organization have the budget to sustain it in the long run?
- If you’re using some open-source tool, is there good documentation for the same?
Developers generally write the test in the same language in which the rest of the database is written for e.g PHPUnit for PHP and Jest for Javascript. The only target here should be to make the test easily integrate-able into the regular development workflow.
So, for a beginner the initial approach to test automation should be to resonate with the idea that other developers may also be contributing to the test automation efforts and framework, making it necessary to choose a code based framework.
Writing the First Test Code
Outline your test before initiating the writing process. The outline gives you a fair estimate of the time and effort you are going to invest which can help you to prioritize and complete the important ones first.
Simply sticking to easier ways may not always help while writing tests. If you forget including error messaging, the only notification you get is - ‘error occurred’, but what caused this error to happen would never be tracked. Thus getting a clear error message streamlines your writing process.
As a first timer it is more important to understand the questions you are going to ask, and how the answer is going to help you achieve the target. Create a practical infrastructure and choosing the best suited software automation tool will give you an excellent foundation to begin with.
Herein again, testers are slowly and rightly moving away from the traditional approach of choosing a tool and automating tests with the tool. Framework is becoming the backbone to enable collective ownership of quality and to that extent testers are becoming enablers to empower everyone on the team drive quality into their role and efforts.
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