Manual testing is performed by a human sitting in front of a computer carefully executing the test steps. Automation Testing means using an automation tool to execute your test case suite. The automation software can also enter test data into the System Under Test , compare expected and actual results and generate detailed test reports.
Test Automation demands considerable investments of money and resources. Successive development cycles will require execution of same test suite repeatedly. Using a test automation tool it's possible to record this test suite and re-play it as required. Once the test suite is automated, no human intervention is required . This improved ROI of Test Automation.
Goal of Automation is to reduce number of test cases to be run manually and not eliminate manual testing all together.
Why Automated Testing?
Automated testing is important due to following reasons:
- Manual Testing of all work flows, all fields , all negative scenarios is time and cost consuming
- It is difficult to test for multi lingual sites manually
- Automation does not require Human intervention. You can run automated test unattended (overnight)
- Automation increases speed of test execution
- Automation helps increase Test Coverage
- Manual Testing can become boring and hence error prone.
Which Test Cases to Automate?
Test cases to be automated can be selected using the following criterion to increase the automation ROI
- High Risk - Business Critical test cases
- Test cases that are executed repeatedly
- Test Cases that are very tedious or difficult to perform manually
- Test Cases which are time consuming
The following category of test cases are not suitable for automation:
- Test Cases that are newly designed and not executed manually atleast once
- Test Cases for which the requirements are changing frequently
- Test cases which are executed on ad-hoc basis.
Automation Process
Test tool selection
Test Tool selection largely depends on the technology the Application Under Test is built on. For instance QTP does not support Informatica. So QTP cannot be used for testing Informatica applications. It's a good idea to conduct Proof of Concept of Tool on AUT
Define the scope of Automation
Scope of automation is the area of your Application Under Test which will be automated. Following points help determine scope:
- Feature that are important for the business
- Scenarios which have large amount of data
- Common functionalities across applications
- Technical feasibility
- Extent to which business components are reused
- Complexity of test cases
- Ability to use the same test cases for cross browser testing
Planning, Design and Development
During this phase you create Automation strategy & plan, which contains following details-
- Automation tools selected
- Framework design and its features
- In-Scope and Out-of-scope items of automation
- Automation test bed preparation
- Schedule and Timeline of scripting and execution
- Deliverables of automation testing
Test Execution
Automation Scripts are executed during this phase. The scripts need input test data before there are set to run. Once executed they provide detailed test reports.
Execution can be performed using the automation tool directly or through the Test Management tool which will invoke the automation tool.
Example: Quality center is the Test Management tool which in turn it will invoke QTP for execution of automation scripts. Scripts can be executed in a single machine or a group of machines. The execution can be done during night , to save time.
Maintenance
As new functionalities are added to the System Under Test with successive cycles, Automation Scripts need to be added, reviewed and maintained for each release cycle. Maintenance becomes necessary to improve effectiveness of Automation Scripts.
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