Automated QA testing is important for companies that practice continuous integration, which means that software is developed, tested, and deployed multiple times per dayEvery piece of software needs to be tested rigorously before it reaches the market.
Every piece of software needs to be tested rigorously before it reaches the market. To do otherwise would be to risk anything from minor bugs to major security vulnerabilities. But the pressure is on to bring software to market faster than ever, and to release more frequent updates to your web and mobile apps to keep up with customer demand.
That’s why many companies rely on quality assurance (QA) automation to continually test their software more effectively and more frequently than manual testers can.
QA automation refers to using a separate piece of software to run tests on the software that you’re developing. In the past, human testers would have to perform many of these tasks themselves, with the aid of some technology to reduce repetition.
But automated testing can handle many of these tasks entirely, and can even perform more advanced tests that aren’t possible to do by hand.
There are several ways to incorporate QA automation into your company, including:
Although the testing process itself can be automated, it still takes some understanding of programming in order to write the script that performs the test.
Typically, your development team will write the source code for your QA tests, but if you use codeless testing software, you may be able to write the tests using keywords.
There are two main ways to automate QA testing:
GUI testing is a type of QA testing that replicates the user experience. For example, it can perform a series of mouse clicks and keystrokes to ensure that the program works as intended, while recording any irregularities for playback and review.
API testing is used to test the application programming interface, which doesn’t have a GUI and therefore needs to be tested at the message layer.
If you’re interested in doing your own QA testing, there are plenty of open source tools that allow you to create your own automated test scripts. These include:
Selenium. This is one of the most popular open source testing tools because it offers plug-ins for a variety of programming languages and works with multiple browsers and OS systems. You can use Selenium WebDriver to build regression tests based in your browser, or Selenium Grid to run your tests at scale across multiple machines.
Appium. This testing tool is designed for mobile apps, including web, hybrid, and native apps on Android, iOS, and Windows.
Cucumber. This tool is designed for Behavior Driven Development (BDD), and allows non-technical customers to help determine how a piece of software should behave.