Every successful organisation knows that effective test automation is the key to delivering a successful agile testing strategy and building better quality software.

Manual testing can then be used more sparingly and for a more targeted exploratory testing approach where edge case bugs are harder to find yet have more impact to the end user.

Bringing automated testing into focus drives multiple benefits from significantly higher test coverage, test repeatability, a better quality product and a happier customer. Automated testing is the way to go for more consistent testing and a faster software release cadence.

What is automated testing?

Automated software testing is a process in which software tools are used to automatically execute tests on an application under test. This process can help to speed up the testing cycle and also help improve the accuracy of the results.

One thing automated testing software doesn’t lack is variety! There are various types of automated software testing tools available and they can be used for different types of tests. For example, some tools can be used to perform unit tests, while others can be used to perform functional tests.

A test plan should be constructed before starting the automated test creation. Using this plan, we will outline the tests that need to be performed on the application under test and the risk basis upon which we should sequence the creation of the automated tests. With a plan and a ready-to-go set of automated tests, we can schedule the execution of the tests and compare the actual results to the expected results in a detailed test run report.

Continual re-use and enhancement of an automated test suite is another strong plus for agile automated testing. You may find yourself running these automated tests against multiple environments, several times a day. Saving time and money and being able to realise continuous integration and delivery are big advantages for any enterprise implementing an automated testing strategy.

And how does it work?

Automated testing is a process of executing automated tests on your software to ensure that it is functioning correctly, without the need for humans undertaking manual testing. 

The two most common types of test automation frameworks are keyword-driven (defining keywords for every function) and data-driven (tests that can be executed with multiple data iterations) for broader-coverage with fewer tests. A hybrid framework incorporates the best traits and practices of both of these.

Both open source and licensed automation tools can assist in creating and running tests with multiple data sets, across different platforms offering support for different programming languages, whilst providing debugging features and integrations to other testing services and bug tracking software.

Why is Automated Testing Needed?

Automated software testing is a good practice agile development strategy that can help improve your software's quality. It can save time and money and provide application quality insights when implemented correctly. 

Automated Testing should be prioritised due to its practicality, predictability, repeatability and effectiveness. Testing is reliable and easy to scale and being able to replicate and re run tests with ease makes for faster test execution and improved bug recording and software quality.

You might want to adopt automated testing for your product for the following reasons: 

• Cost reduction

• Better test accuracy and coverage

• Faster development and delivery

• Better resource management

• Reducing human error or limitations

• Increased reusability of the test suite

What Kind of Tests should Companies Automate?

As a company, you can use automated testing software to test a wide range of application features. The main types of testing tools used in enterprises will help Developers and Testers with Unit, Functional, Regression, Smoke, Accessibility testing and many more. 

Through implementing these many types of tests, Development teams can also categorise and prioritise which features need testing, in which order, with which frequency, clearly identifying those that are crucial to the development process and product quality enhancement.

If you have business-critical tests to run, you can automate and schedule them to run on a repeating basis as often as you need them to. This will ensure your continuous testing process alerts you to business critical application bugs as soon as possible.

Automated testing tools can also assist in relieving your team of repetitive and tiresome manual testing cycles that consume large numbers human testers, can be error prone and not repeatable in a timely manner.

Principles to follow when using Automated Testing Software:

1. Choose the appropriate automation tool for your product -  a specialised tool, tailored for your product’s testing needs will improve delivery time and quality.

2. Plan tests meticulously - clearly define your test cases to be easily understandable, with wide data driven iteration and deep extensive functional coverage.

3. Establish test hierarchy by importance - some tests are significantly more valuable and mission critical than others. Plan the sequence accordingly for the most important quality insight.

4. Re-evaluate your testing coverage - as your product develops and changes, you should reassess which features still require good test coverage. Redundant tests can and should be archived.

5. Review your results quickly - Get alerts for failed tests as soon as possible and raise and fix bugs at the earliest opportunity. Finding errors and bugs earlier in the cycle won’t require as much effort, time and budget to fix. Test as early and frequently as possible

Conclusion

Effective Automated Software Testing is incredibly important for businesses in these highly competitive times. It not only helps with reducing costs, delivery times, effort and manual effort, but also helps to enhance your product’s quality. Even though automated testing strategies are ever-changing and adoption rates grow continually, it’s a good practice to keep manual exploratory and automated testing as sister approaches in a bid to develop your perfect website or application.