Automation Testing…What, Why, How, When?

What is testing? What are the different ways a software can be tested?

Software testing is the process of finding and preventing failures and defects to provide a high-quality product that meets all the requirements of all the stakeholders. Testing can be done in two ways; one is Manual Testing and the other is Automation Testing.

What is Manual Testing?

Manual testing is done by a human manually by sitting In-front of the computer and executing each test case and comparing the actual test result with the expected test result and provide the test report.

What is Automation Testing?

Automation testing is executing the same test cases with the help of an automation test tool. The automation software can enter the input data into the system under test and compare the expected result and actual result and generate a detailed test report.

Why Automated testing?

• Manual testing is time consuming.
• Automation testing does not need any human intervention, so the testing can be done unattended.
• Automation increases the speed of test execution.
• Automation increases the test coverage.

Which test case to be Automated?

• Test cases that are executed repeatedly.
• Test cases with high risk which may affect the business critically. (Example: login validation)
• Test cases which are prerequisite to some other test cases.

Test cases that are not good to automate.

• Test cases that are newly automated and not executed manually atleast once.
• Test cases for which the requirements are frequently changing.
• Test cases which are done on an ad-hoc basis.

When do we run the automated test cases?

• When the software is in the production stage and a minor bug is fixed, then instead of running the whole bunch of regression test a sanity check can be conducted to check the stability of the application which includes all the features of that application. This sanity test can be automated test cases.
• When a new feature is added to the QA environment, the QA team will run a sanity test before testing the feature to ensure that the application is stable enough to do the testing. This sanity check can be automated.
• Other than Sanity testing, automation can be done in different situations such as Smoke testing, regression testing, and also it varies depends on the project and test cases.