Automation Testing as Critical Tool in Software Development Life Cycle

By Vidhya Dharmalingam

During the software development life cycle (SDLC), quality assurance testing is critically important and impacts a seamless user experience and utilization of the product.

Beautiful design, concise code, and clear UX are only effective if QA measures are implemented prior to launch, and consistently maintained afterwards. Testing ensures that business requirements and user expectations are met with seamless and bug-free functionalities. Many tech companies are leveraging a multitude of testing methodologies and tools to achieve this.

At Sulzer US, we are passionate about agile custom software development and conduct functional and non-functional testing of our solutions. Automation Testing has become a useful and reliable method which simulates desired user actions and analyzes the application to ensure that it matches the expected behavior.

What is Automation Testing?

Automation testing is a process that involves an automation tool which simulates a user action and analyzes the application to make sure they match the expected behavior.

A Few Types of Tests That Can Be Automated Are:

• User Interface Testing – Testing the User Interface of applications
• Mobile Testing – Testing native, web and hybrid apps
• API Testing – Testing SOAP and REST APIs
• Load Testing – Testing applications under heavy load

Automation Testing Best Practices:

Come up with the test scenarios. Picking the right scenarios to automate is the key. Repetitive, critical, extensive, and complex scenarios are the ones that should be automated.

Choose the best-suited automation tool. We should use an automation tool where it is easy to create, maintain, and execute test scripts while creating good test reports, offering adequate technical support and reasonable pricing. For example, Selenium is the one of the best tools for Web UI automation and Appium for mobile automation.

Define the framework. For automation testing, a framework is the technical implementation guideline. Frameworks standardize the format and allow us to reuse the code in various scenarios.

Creating test scripts which are resistant to changes. It is highly recommended to have unique names for your element controls. It makes the automated tests resistant to change and ensures that automated test scripts work without having to make time consuming changes to the test to insure usability on a regular basis.

Don’t automate functionalities, until they are stable. If you are trying to automate the scenarios during the process of development, you will be spending more time fixing the scripts (based on the new changes) than testing the functionality and finding bugs.

Don’t automate the look and feel of the application. You should not write scripts to verify the look and feel of the application, such as layout, position, and size of the web elements, as they are likely to change quite often.

Benefits of Automation Testing:

Stability of the application. With Automation Testing the application can be tested more frequently, which helps us to detect and fix bugs as early as possible.

Reusability of the test scripts. Test scripts can be reused for different environments or for cross browser and cross device testing.

Increases your test coverage. With Automation Testing we can increase the depth and scope of tests.

Load testing. Automation testing allows us to execute the same test on multiple devices at the same time, which cannot be done manually with limited resources.

Improves accuracy. Automation testing is more accurate  when running the exact same tests repetitively. Manual testing is always prone to errors.

Saves time. Even though the initial implementation of test scripts takes time, in the long run, Test Scripts help to save time in executing the same test cases again & again.

When rolling out new features for Virtual Show Room (VSR), an application we developed and operate for a leading luxury automaker, we conduct a full regression on the application to ensure the quality of the new release. By implementing automation testing, it saves time and allows us to redeploy budgets to other critical tasks. The deployment pipeline executes Automation test scripts on all builds of the test environment. This helps us identify and address issues sooner, further ensuring quality of a release.

To maintain the stability of this product, we run automation tests every night. The testing produces a detailed test report indicating passed/failed items and identifying bugs to resolve early. The automated test scripts run outside of business hours, which speeds up the process and saves manual testing resources for other engagements.

Sources:

Automation Testing Tutorial
Automation Best Practices
Automation Testing Overview

To learn more about innovation at Sulzer US, please visit our website.

About the Author: Vidhya Dharmalingam is a Software Quality Engineer at Sulzer US. Sulzer US is technology company delivering innovative cloud, big data, and AI solutions to industry-leading clients. We build and run our solutions and serve as strategic partners to our clients. We achieve success by investing in our people and products with focus on innovation and solving complex business challenges.