Software test automation

In this post, you’ll learn what software test automation is, how it works, and its benefits and drawbacks. We’ll also cover the best practices for software test automation and the types of tests you should automate versus the types of tests that should be conducted manually.

What is software test automation?

Software test automation refers to the practice of using tools to create tests and test libraries that can be automatically executed during the software development and QA process instead of going through a checklist manually. It increases the effectiveness and efficiency of testing, improves test coverage, saves time, and reduces human error.

Why software test automation is needed

Software test automation is needed for the following reasons:

• Since it automates repetitive tasks, it dramatically enhances efficiency and saves valuable resources and time.
• It frees up resources to focus more on innovating and delivering value to your customers.
• It provides repeatable and consistent test results and reduces the likelihood of human errors, which improves software reliability.
• Software test automation allows for faster feedback loops, allowing teams to find and address bugs early on in the development process. This, in turn, reduces the risk of more expensive fixes down the road.
• It ensures timely delivery, reliability, and quality of software.

How software test automation works

Software test automation solutions play a role in the task of continuous testing by automating processes and eliminating the need for manual intervention in initiating, managing, and tracking tests. Test automation also identifies how much of the system is evaluated by different tests and what other types of testing might be needed to cover all the moving parts.

Test automation also identifies how much of the system is covered by different tests and what other types of testing might be needed to cover all the moving parts.

As a result, software test automation helps ensure that teams maintain a high standard of quality throughout the software delivery pipeline. It also allows testers to avoid getting mired in the details of managing testing logistics so they can spend more time creating effective test cases that help deliver higher quality software faster.

This is what the general process looks like.

Step 1: Choose the right tool

To implement software test automation, you first need to choose the right tool. Which tool is best for you depends on the type of testing you want to conduct and the platform that was used to develop the software. Make sure you choose a tool that also collects data and provides detailed reports.

A software test automation solution must be able to automate and manage tasks such as the following:

• Identifying where new code is being used, which pieces of code must be tested, and how testing requirements relate to the ongoing process of developing and releasing new iterations
• Managing communication between stakeholders about needs for testing
• Analyzing what percentage of code is covered by existing tests, and what tests are needed to increase that coverage
• Scheduling and starting tests automatically at every stage of the software delivery pipeline
• Creating test cases and monitoring the progress of each test case to completion
• Preventing quickly evolving software from returning an overwhelming number of false positives or requiring burdensome test maintenance

Step 2: Define the scope

Once you choose the right tools, you need to determine the parts of software testing that you’ll automate and define the scope in detail.

Step 3: Come up with a strategy

Now that you know what you want to automate, you can move on to planning and designing your automation strategy and developing the test scripts.

Step 4: Conduct tests

Use the automation you designed to run the tests on your software.

Step 5: Maintain and update

Maintain, modify, and update the tests as needed as new versions of your software are developed.

Advantages of software test automation

Software test automation offers extraordinary advantages over manual script-based testing methods.

• Accelerated software delivery: By automating processes and supporting continuous testing, software test automation solutions can significantly reduce test cycle times to increase the pace of testing and delivering applications.
• Fewer errors: Software test automation minimizes the amount of human intervention in the testing process, thereby also minimizing the errors that tend to accompany manual testing processes.
• Lower costs: By reducing the time and effort required from developers and testing teams, test automation can dramatically reduce the cost of testing and delivering software.
• Higher quality: By focusing on business risk and providing feedback earlier in the process, test automation helps to deliver software that represents a lower risk to the business.

Downsides of software test automation

Despite its many benefits, software test automation can potentially have drawbacks, too.

• High initial setup costs: To be able to conduct automated testing, you first need to invest in infrastructure, testing tools, and training.
• Lacks intuition: While automation testing can execute predefined scripts perfectly, it can never replace human intuition, which is often needed in more complex scenarios.
• Requires maintenance: As newer versions of your software are released, you need to maintain your tests so that they remain relevant. If you don’t update your tests, you might end up with false test results.
• Workload intensive: With that said, writing, updating, and maintaining tests, particularly scripts that rely on code-based authoring,can be very time-consuming and resource-intensive.
• Doesn’t work for UX: While it’s great for functional testing, automation testing is not the best option for evaluating user experience.

Software test automation best practices

To get the most out of your software test automation strategy, here are some best practices you should follow.

• Instead of trying to automate all tests, your goal should be to automate repetitive, high-risk, or regression tests.
• Evaluate your team’s skills, budget, and project needs before choosing a testing framework or tool. Make sure you consider the integration capabilities, ease of use, and scalability of each tool before making the final choice.
• Make sure you create test cases that are clear and easy to understand, debug, and change.
• When creating test cases, make sure you don’t miss any steps that a manual tester might perform intuitively because each step can affect the reliability and outcome of the test.
• Create a detailed test automation strategy document that outlines the resources needed, the scope, and the objectives. Make sure the document includes the tools you choose, the test cases, and maintenance policies and procedures.
• Use reliable and clean test data to make sure your tests are reusable and accurate.
• Integrate your automated tests with your CI/CD pipeline to identify and resolve regressions early.
• Generate detailed test reports that give clear and actionable insights into the execution logs, failures, and test results.
• Never make assumptions during automated testing. Assumptions can lead to inaccurate results, false positives and negatives, and gaps in the test coverage.

Software test automation use cases

You shouldn’t try to automate all software tests. Instead, you should first start with the following.

• Unit tests: Unit testing involves testing each individual component or element of a product or software before integrating and testing them together.
• Integration tests: In this kind of testing, the different components of the application are integrated and tested together as a whole. Integration testing involves testing the communication between each module to determine if they work as expected.
• Automated acceptance tests: These are created before development on a new feature starts. They outline the objectives and standards that the feature should meet.
• Smoke tests: The purpose of these tests is to check the product’s stability.
• End-to-end tests: End-to-end testing simulates the user experience and capture user flow sequences. Thus, they ensure that real users have a bug-free experience.
• Performance tests: These tests run test cases across different performance metrics like search results response time and time to page load to determine if there’s a loss of speed or any regression.

What types of tests should you do manually?

While automating tests boosts productivity, in some cases, the ROI of automating isn’t worth it when compared to conducting tests manually. Here are some software tests that your team should do manually:

• Exploratory testing: Since exploratory testing is random and involves using unscripted sequences to uncover bugs, automated tests aren’t the best choice since these follow a predefined sequence. It’s more efficient to assign a QA tester to find bugs.
• Visual regression testing: Visual regression refers to when a visual design flaw like wrong colors, wrong font, or incorrectly positioned UI elements are introduced in the UI. While there are tools that can run automated tests to capture such regressions, they aren’t widely adopted. These tests are also more expensive to develop, and it’s more effective to have a QA tester test for visual issues.

Tricentis solutions for software test automation

Tricentis Tosca helps organizations manage the complexity of software test automation. As a market-leading, model-based test automation solution, Tosca accelerates testing with a scriptless, AI-based, no-code approach for end-to-end test automation.

Tosca is powered by Vision AI, a next-generation AI-driven test automation technology that allows teams to automate UI test cases independent of the underlying technology. Tricentis Tosca also provides development and testing teams the following benefits and abilities:

• Achieve end-to-end continuous testing: Tricentis supports 160-plus technologies to provide end-to-end test automation ranging from API to UI (web, mobile, or custom), databases to BI solutions, and programming languages to packaged applications.
• Improve risk coverage: Tricentis Tosca offers risk-based testing that lets testing teams remove redundancies from their test case portfolio to gain over 80% risk coverage with the optimal set of tests to execute for each release.
• Simplify API test automation: Tricentis Tosca breaks down the technical barrier involved in API test automation by supplying the transition from UI testing to API testing through a model-based approach. Any tester can create API tests from an intuitive, business-readable interface and integrate them into end-to-end test scenarios that span across web UIs, mobile, enterprise, and custom applications, and more.
• Avoid script maintenance with Tricentis model-based test automation: This model-based test automation (MBTA) solution is the industry’s only automation approach that provides rapid creation of resilient and easily maintainable tests. This feature allows Tricentis customers to achieve test automation rates of 90% from release to release.
• Run tests with reliable data: Tricentis TDM (Test Data Management) automatically creates and provisions on-demand synthetic or masked production data for test automation, helping to drastically minimize the time required for test data creation.
• Flexible deployment models: With a single subscription of Tosca, users have the option to deploy in the cloud, on-prem, or in a hybrid model, allowing Tosca to be utilized in whichever way best suits a company’s organizational requirements.