Test Automation: Latest Trends and Practices

Test automation has played an important role in reducing the production cost and streamline the entire QA process. This is one of the advantageous trends that can be seen with test automation. Over the past few months, test automation has seen some new trends and modern techniques, which has emerged as an effectual force within the industry. With the new design approaches, it is very much required to test the new elements on diverse platforms to ensure product’s compatibility and effectiveness. Test automation uses a pre-programmed environment, which ensures product’s quality along with efficiency and effectiveness. However, test automation still lacks the agility and creativity as offered by manual testing. Moreover, there are cases where test automation fails to deliver according to the expectation. So, the essence of test automation is to get it right. But, how?

In order to get the value out of the advanced test automation approaches, there are various good practices that need to be followed.

  1. Automate the right tests: There are various tests that are incorporated in test automation. However, depending upon the case, a test could prove to be more efficient as compared to others. The idea is to choose a feasible test that would use the resources efficiently and is economical.
  2. Business oriented projects: In order to reduce the loopholes in finding bugs and thus reducing its impact on the business, the project must be led from a business perspective. Automated test engineers must work independently with the least interference with the developers. This is to ensure that the product is tested from a user’s perspective rather than using developers test suites.
  3. Use different technologies: With the test automation hitting its peak, there are many tools that have evolved quicker than ever in the recent past. Different tools offer different approaches and methods. An ideal implementation would be to use an approach that offers easy migration to new tools.

 Today, automated frameworks with a mixture of technology and methods are fulfilling the testing needs of various organizations. Moreover, the adaptability of data and behavior driven scripts in the testing environment has minimized the need of programming code.  This has made room for non-technical testers to build more readable and structured scripts using normal English. As a result, the subject matter experts could construct the input and would know the system behavior under different scenarios, saving time and money.

The test scripts are then translated into executable tests with the help of automated frameworks. The test that needs to be executed is managed by various tools (both commercial and open source) supported by the application framework. Some of the tools used as an engine include QTP, Selenium Web Driver, and more.

The results generated by the framework are in a raw form, which needs to be translated into some meaningful information related to the business. Environmental data and other related information are of equal significance, especially while generating reports based on the outcomes, as these reports play a vital role in making project related decisions.