What is software testing?
Software testing is a process within software development in which business-critical software is verified for correctness and quality. Software testing is done to be very sure that expected business systems behave correctly as planned.
Software testing can perform either be a manual or an automated process.
- Manual testing is done by a team or individual who will manually operate a software product and ensure it behaves as expected.
- Automated testing: It has several tools ranging from code correctness to manual testing experience.
- In software, automation testing the execution of tests and the comparison of actual results with predicted results. In it, the test engineer can create scripts for recursive tasks but business-critical tasks in a validation testing process already in place, or perform additional testing that would be a bit difficult to do manually.
- The general used approached for automation testing in Mobile App Developer Singapore are mentioned below:
- Graphical user interface testing (Functional Testing): The testing framework that simulates a user interface events such as keystrokes/keyboard events and mouse clicks, and observes the changes that result in the user interface, to validate that the simulated observable behavior of the program is correct.
- API driven testing: A testing framework that uses a programming interface to the application to verify the application’s behavior under test. Typically API driven testing bypasses the application user interface together. Test automation is beneficial for business with continuous delivery and continuous testing.
It is called as the process to run automated test scripts for getting immediate outcome/feedback on the business risks associated features with a software release by website development company Singapore for Continuous Testing (CT).
Automation can also perform:
- Smoke Testing
- Unit Testing
- Integration Testing
- Regression Testing
- System Testing
- Load/Performance Testing
- GUI responsiveness testing (using Galen Framework)
Automation Testing Tools
The list of most popular open-source testing tools are given below
- Selenium: a very robust tool for testing of Web Applications. Provides browser support.
- Appium: Tool that supports mobile testing, native app testing, hybrid, and mobile web application testing.
- Robotium: a test automation framework that is mainly intended for Android UI testing. Support both native and hybrid android based applications.
- Cucumber: The concept of Behavioural driven development using which Cucumber allows you to do automated acceptance testing
- Watir: This is an extremely lightweight, technology-independent open source testing tool for web automation testing.
- Sikuli: Open source tool for GUI testing.
- JMeter: A tool that is used for performance tests.
- Rest Assured: Google’s Library to create an API test framework.
- SoapUI: Tool for API testing.
- Katalon Studio: Katalon is a free web and mobile test automation solution. It is simple to use, provides cross-platform support and has a nice JIRA integration
- Testlink: Test Link is an open-source web-based test management tool that was primarily featured for test plans, test cases, user roles, test projects, and test specifications.
- Windmill: Windmill is an open-source web testing tool created for automating and debugging web applications.
- TestNG: It supports almost all kinds of testing like unit testing, functional testing, integration testing, data-driven testing, end-to-end testing, etc.
- Marathon: Marathon is an open-source test automation framework that is designed to test Java-based GUI applications.
- Httest: Httest is used to create all types of Http-based tests. It offers a range of Http based functionalities.
- Maven: Maven is basically an open-source build management automation tool mainly.
- Espresso: It is an open-source UI testing framework for Android only that is helpful in creating robust user interface tests within a single app.
- FitNesse: FitNesse is an open-source automation acceptance testing framework. It is centered over the framework for an integrated test.
- Tsung: Tsung is an open-source load and stress testing tool. It is compatible with multiple protocols and works with HTTP, SOAP, LDAP, etc.
- Gatling: Gatling is an open-source load and performance testing tool developed for web applications.
- KIF: KIF (Keep it functional) is an open-source iOS functional testing framework.
- iMacros: iMacros is obtainable as a free browser add-on for FF, IE, and Chrome browsers.
- Linux Desktop Testing Tool: LDTP is an open-source automated testing tool for GUI testing.
- Locust: A tool that is used for performance tests.
Platform/OS and Browser coverage:
Using the automation script we can increase the coverage very rapidly:
Which Test Cases to Automate?
Test cases to be automated using the following criterion to increase the automation ROI
- High Risk – Business Critical test cases/features
- Test cases that are repeatedly executed
- Test Cases those are very monotonous or difficult to perform manually
- Test Cases are taking too much time.
Working Process of Automation:
Moving ahead, let’s talk about the working process of automation testing. Generally, it involves major steps, which are mentioned below.
Framework approach in automation
A test automation framework is an interconnected system that sets the rules of automation of a specific product. This system integrates the functional library, test data, web object details, and various reusable components. These components act as small logical blocks that need to be assembled to represent a business flow. The framework helps to provide the basis of test automation and simplifies the automation effort.
The main benefits of a framework logical concept, and tools that provide robust support for automated software testing is the low cost for maintenance.
Choosing the right framework helps us in maintaining lower costs. The costs depend on test scripting development and maintenance efforts.
A various framework is generally used:
1. Linear (procedural code, possibly generated by the record and playback tools)
2. Structured (uses control like- ‘if-else’, ‘switch’, ‘for’, ‘while’ conditions/ statements)
3. Data-driven (data is persisted outside of tests in a database, other mechanism or spreadsheet)
4. Keyword-driven framework
5. Hybrid (a combination of two or more of the patterns above are used)
The Testing framework is responsible for:
1. defining the format in which to showcase expectations
2. creating a way to hook into or drive the AUT
3. executing the test cases
4. reporting the results of execution
How to Choose an Automation Tool?
Selecting the right automation tool can be a tricky task. Following criterion will help you select the good tool for your requirement-
- Environment Support
- Ease of use
- Testing of Database
- Object identification
- Image Testing
- Error Recovery Testing
- Object Mapping
- Scripting Language Used
- Support for different types of tests – including functional, test management, tab, mobile, etc…
- Support for multiple testing frameworks
- Easy to debug the automation software scripts
- Ability to recognize objects in any environment
- Extensive test reports and results
- Minimize training cost of selected tools
Automation Tool Best Practices
To get maximum ROI(Return Of Investment) of automation, observe the following
- The vision of Automation needs to be determined in much detail before the start of the project. This sets expectations from Automation right.
- Select the appropriate automation tool: A tool must NOT be selected based on its popularity, but it’s fit to the automation requirements.
- Choose the right framework
- Scripting Standards- We should follow a standard while writing the scripts for Automation. Some of them are-
o Create logical scripts, comments, and indentation of the code.
o Exception handling – How error is handled on system failure or retry mechanism or unexpected behavior of the application.
o User-conventional messages should be coded for Error Logging for testers to understand.
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