Quality assurance (QA) has proven itself to be one of the most essential parts of the software development lifecycle (SDLC), and that’s why QA services are so sought-after these days.
Whether you’re building a brand-new solution from scratch or just making some tweaks to an existing one, you should always employ QA services to put it through its paces in terms of usability, performance, and security testing. The correlation here is pretty straightforward: the more efficient your QA procedure is, the sooner you can plan new releases. That’s a platitude, for sure, but as the market data demonstrates, it’s not easy to put into practice.
Leaders need to embrace QA services and develop novel methods of quality control as corporate technology estates continue to expand annually. And an automated quality assurance service is a key strategy for doing this.
What Exactly is QA Automation?
In software development, quality assurance (QA) automation refers to the practice of employing automated testing processes to check that a product meets all of the predetermined standards for things like its source code, features (business logic), and user interface.
Of course, all that workload could be done manually by human testers, but it also required a much higher involvement. So, to speed things up, quality assurance professionals started creating automated test scripts that replaced the manual testing procedures and checked the developed code for compliance with quality, security, or commercial criteria. Many of the tests executed have become standard, iterative procedures needed to verify the code before it is deployed or after it has been modified.
Why is QA Automation Important?
Over the course of one hundred days in 2011, Google developers created and released over a hundred new Google+ features. The question is how did they do that? An essential part of making it happen was combining manual and automated testing strategically across the software development life cycle.
Since then, Google has “upgraded” its foundational setup to Google’s Test Automation Platform (TAP) — the biggest software test automation framework in the world, supported by DevOps practices like Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Testing (CT), and Continuous Delivery (CD) (CD).
TAP typically spends a day integrating and testing more than 13,000 code projects, which requires 800,000 builds and 150,000,000 test runs.
What’s even better? Test automation yields impressive processing speeds even at modest scales, in addition to other advantages.
- More cost-effective than manual testing alone, with a faster response on newly-released code.
- A quick turnaround time that boosts the team’s productivity.
- Since there is less possibility of human errors, test results are more reliable.
- Greater test coverage with less time spent on each test.
- Ability to reuse test cases and reduce duplication of effort.
- Product innovations can reach consumers more quickly.
In other words, through the use of automated testing, software development cycles can be accelerated without sacrificing quality. However, if you want to be sure that your tests cover every possible situation, from beginning to end, then you need an automated testing framework designed specifically for that purpose.
An organization’s test automation framework is the set of policies, programs, and procedures it employs to carry out thorough quality assurance across the software development lifecycle.
Building a Test Automation Framework
More than ninety-five percent of businesses acknowledge that test automation concepts, processes, and patterns are essential to their operations. However, only a fraction of organizations have made significant headway in developing test automation frameworks.
Automated quality assurance is a complicated yet methodical procedure. To go from manual testing to automated testing, you must take many fundamental steps.
The following is a breakdown and illustration of these best practices by our QA team.
Choose the best test automation framework architecture
It’s important to keep in mind that quality control encompasses many different tasks. You may test freshly created software from several perspectives to make sure it performs as expected and has no major flaws or security flaws.
That’s why there’s a wide variety of assessments, split into two categories:
Functional testing
- Unit tests
- Component tests
- Smoke tests
- Regression tests
- API tests
- UI tests
Non-functional testing
- Performance tests
- Load tests
- Pentesting (security tests)
- Stress tests
- Volume tests
- Recovery tests
However, having all of these doesn’t mean that you should use every single one of them in your framework. While yes, a test automation framework is a set of methods for automating standardized tests, a good test automation framework should focus on specific tasks and solve necessary problems.
For example, while using a Keyword-driven framework, you break down the test logic into keywords and functions, store them in a separate Object Repository and call it in when you need to run a test. In a Modular-driven framework, you analyze all available test cases to identify repeatable flows to later turn them into functions and score as test scripts, that can be reused and combined to perform different testing scenarios. A Behavior-driven framework allows you to define application behaviors through human-readable (e.g. register an account) test commands, that are codified into test cases using BDD (Behavior Driven Development) tools. With a Data-driven framework, you build test cases around available test data, stored in a table or a spreadsheet. That allows you to run a single test script that validates all the data and generates outputs in the same table. Or you could create a mix and work with a Hybrid framework, which essentially can be any combination of the above AQA frameworks.
Create a reference test automation framework
QA frameworks have four layers:
- Test generation
- Test definition
- Test execution
- Test adaptation
These govern TAS (test automation solution) and SUT (system under test) connections. These four tiers generate testing automation rules and standards.
Decide on your test automation tech stack
A testing automation framework combines processes and technologies. The preceding section explained the process layout. Let’s talk about QA automation tools.
QA automation tools are:
- Open-source – community-developed, free software. There are no limits for modification.
- Proprietary tools – licensed applications with strong native capabilities.
- Custom solutions – any mix of the above two choices within your AQA framework.
When choosing a QA automation stack, consider:
- Programming language (most QA tools are language-specific)
- Platform support (web, mobile, tablet, etc)
- Operating System (your testers are using)
Evans recommends these automated testing tools:
- Cross-browser web testing framework Selenium WebDriver
- Cypress — end-to-end JavaScript testing framework
- Open-source WinAppDriver automates desktop testing
NPM Trends compares QA automation solutions and test automation frameworks.
Choose your implementation strategy
After choosing a test framework, you have to decide on an implementation method. The case of Selenium will help us demonstrate different implementation paths.
Like other QA automation tools Selenium supports test design patterns:
- Wrapper methods: these techniques encapsulate software components. You develop a custom version of a function because the original doesn’t satisfy your needs (e.g., it’s too complex or doesn’t do all the testing you need).
- Abstraction methods: software engineers use abstraction to conceal superfluous details from consumers. Abstraction improves code organization and maintainability in test frameworks.
- Page Object methods: most test cases are organized using the Page Object technique. In this case, each web page of an application is denoted as a class file that contains all web page components. Then these parts are tested. Such a strategy helps reduce code duplication and test maintenance.
To conclude, no technique is better or worse; they each have various uses and require an individual approach from a QA testing expert.
Develop Test data
Last but not least — data. Data drives automated testing, so the logic here is pretty straightforward: more data = better results. Pre-production QA may lack first-hand data to cover all testing situations.
To cover this, consider:
- Automatically generated synthetic data.
- Mass copies of data from production to testing environment.
- Legacy systems data.
- Manual data entry.
Next, you will have to group all the data accordingly and save it in a test data management tool.
Wrapping Up
QA automation is an ongoing effort. You must work in increments to add additional automated test cases. Starting with a small number of test cases for a single project, completely documenting them inside a reference framework, and then gradually adding more test cases is, in our opinion, the best method to approach QA automation.
Working in chunks allows you to examine your testing rhythm and identify any holes (or duplications) in your test case designs. You’ll be able to bring to market more competitive digital goods and cut the testing time required to do so without sacrificing quality.
Get in touch with www.edvantis.com to get expert advice on how to use QA services to automate quality assurance at your company.
