Automated Software Testing

What is Automated Testing?  

Automated testing refers to the use of software tools to automate manual human intervention for reviewing and verifying software applications or products.

These days, many DevOps and agile software projects use automation testing from the beginning phase. To understand its value, it’s important to understand how life looked alike before its adoption. That way, there’ll be a genuine reason to turn to automation in testing, won’t it?

Well, when manual testing was at its peak in the past, software companies would consider employing full-time quality assurance (QA) teams. The team would build different testing plans or step-by-step checklists to ensure the performance of the software feature as expected.  

If there were any changes or updates to the software project, the team would manually execute the test plans. After that, QA teams would report the results to the engineering teams to review and fix the bugs in the software project.  

This manual process was time- and money-consuming and error-prone. That’s where the game of software automated testing started.   

Engineering teams take responsibility for automated testing. Along with the development of the feature, they create the test plans for each feature. Then, software’s continuous integration tools play a key role to execute these test plans automatically.

With automation, there are two major benefits to see. First, organizations don’t need a big QA team size. Second, QA teams will primarily focus on the critical features of the software.  

Software Test Automation in CI/CD

Continuous delivery (CD) aims to deliver new code updates to users quickly. Automated testing comes in handy to achieve this speed-up process. With that, the updates take a short time. However, if there is a slow and manual part in the delivery process, it’s not possible to automate the delivery to users.       

The CD is one stage of the large deployment pipeline. CD takes place after the other stage, continuous integration (CI), which means CD follows and depends on CI.

When there are new code updates, CI runs automated tests against them. This way, CI ensures that the new updates don’t breach the existing features or if there are any new bugs in the updates. So, once CI completes processing, CD then comes to show its best.    

This effective bond between CI and CD brings many benefits to the table for the fast-moving software team. It’s true to say that automated software testing has made the development lifecycle easier. That’s just because it checks the quality at each stage of the development by ensuring new updates don’t produce bugs. And? The software is always ready for deployment.

Here is the hierarchy:

• Continuous Delivery
• Continuous Integration
• Automated Testing  

What kinds of software tests need to be automated first?

Here is a list of the types of software tests that must be automated as a priority:

End-to-End tests

Our list starts with the most important tests to look at first, end-to-end (E2E) tests. E2E tests simulate how a user interacts with every stack of the software product. Here, the test plans include scenarios like “a user can log in/log out”, “a user can deposit”, or “a user can put changes in email settings.” That means these tests ensure that users don’t face any hurdles when using the software or there are no bugs in the new updates.  

E2E tests go through the users’ actions by capturing and replaying them. Those actions then serve as the recordings in E2E test plans.  If any part of automated testing coverage is missing in a software product, implementing E2E tests can provide significant value to the essential processes within a business.

To record the users’ actions, E2E tests can appear costly. However, if the software application doesn’t require daily updates, the cost-effective way is to manually intervene with the human team for E2E tests.

Unit tests

These tests refer to single units of code. Unit tests come in the context of the function, which means they cover a single function.  

Unit tests ensure the expected input to a particular function produces the expected output. These tests are perfect for the code that includes sensitive calculations. Industries like health care, finance, or aerospace must consider them.

On top of that, unit tests are cost-effective and fast to implement, giving you significant ROI.   

Integration tests

Most of the time, a unit of code will require an external 3rd party service. The main codebase that is under testing will not link to the code of this 3rd party service. However, integration tests are helpful in that regard.

Integration tests simulate those external services and ensure that the code behaves with them in the correct way.

Integration tests are written similarly to unit tests, and both of them often use the same tools. Plus, if you can’t afford the E2E tests, integration tests can be the cheap alternative option. However, the ROI can be compromised if the combination of unit and E2E tests is already being used.

Performance tests     

Performance means how the software performs in the context of speed and responsiveness. Simple as that. The best examples of performance measures are “page loading time”, “‘response time of search results”, and “time to first render”.

Performance tests keep track of the examples of such cases. Finally, automated performance tests will execute the tests throughout these measures and report to the teams if the software has slowdowns in speed.

What kinds of software tests should be done manually?

No doubt, using automated testing is the best way to save your time and labour costs. But automation is not a silver bullet to every test. Some software tests demand manual testing process, too, such as:  

Exploratory testing

Automated QA testing depends on the scripts and behaves in a specific way.  The software applications get tested JUST on that script. But that doesn’t work to find every issue, right?

That’s why exploratory testing comes as an unscripted series of steps to find bugs. There are many software tools to support software exploratory testing, but they are not fully developed or commonly used yet.

In that case, the best way is to call the manual QA tester to think out of the box to test the application thoroughly. The manual assistance will focus on breaking the application at every point.  

Visual regression testing

A visual regression takes place when a visual design fault or inconsistency is explained to the software UI. Examples of this regression could be wrong colours, incorrect fonts, misplaced UI elements, and more.  

Similar to exploratory testing, there is a wide selection of tools to write automated software tests to detect these regressions. These tools simply take screenshots of different aspects of the application. Then, they use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to do a comparison between the screenshots and the expected visuals.   

But here is a bottleneck, too. Automated visual tests can demand a lot of cost to develop, and the tools are not very common yet.

However, the effective approach is to have humans with eagle eyes to spot the visual issues.

Developing a test automation framework for the DevOps team

Automated testing doesn’t have a single solution that addresses all its needs. So, when picking an automated option for your team, you must consider a few important things.  

Release schedule

If the software applications have a fixed release schedule, e.g. weeks or months, then the better way to go is manual testing. In exceptional cases where there is a need for quick release, the wise option is to choose testing automation because CI and CD depend on it.

Accessible tools and ecosystem

Different programming languages have their own set of tools and utilities that work for them. Similarly, each type of automated test method requires specific tools. Now, it’s possible that these automated software testing tools might be available in a specific programming language ecosystem.  So, for the best implementation of automated testing, you need to have both the programming language and the appropriate tools that support each other.   

Product market fit and code base maturity

If you’re developing a new product with no targeted audience and business model, neglecting the automation approach makes sense. Automated tests appear as safety measures to prevent unexpected issues in the code. Thus, if your team needs to change the code in a repetitive way, managing and updating automated tests can be expensive and frustrating for you.   

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