Ultimate Guide to Automated Testing: Tools and Techniques

Automated testing is a rewarding and in-demand platform that has proved to be a game changer in the software testing domain taking it to new heights of innovative and rapid testing processes. Automation tools are designed to boost the overall efficiency of software testing activities by increasing the speed of execution and carrying it out more effectively. In this article, you will get to know about automated tools along with their tools and techniques.

What is automation testing?

It is a testing method wherein test cases are executed by leveraging automated testing tools. Repetitive and laborious testing tasks that are difficult to perform manually can be automated, thereby saving effort and time. The testing processes are simplified and the associated costs related to software releases are minimized. The time-to-market process is quickened.

Following are a few techniques that help in leveraging the automation testing process:

1. Keyword testing: Appropriate selection of keywords will eventually have a constructive impact. For example, if the content is related to sports, sports-related advertisements should pop up. Through automated testing, the efficiency and quality of testing keywords are improved. Resources are freed and thus those areas that need human intelligence and manual intervention are boosted.

2. Utilizing parallel testing: Tests can be parallelly executed on different devices with the help of a few automation tools. Parallel testing can be enabled on different virtual and real machines by using an automated script. The testing process will be triggered one after the other and there is a short lag between each of them. The number of executions can be increased at any given time.

3. Testing updates: Whenever features that have been updated need to be tested, there is a requirement to generate a new user ID each time, so that the outcome cannot be influenced by the cache. This is quite a difficult task. To solve this task, a database can be restored by writing a script by cleaning or removing new changes, so that the same information can be reused.

4. The value of API testing: The developer community is making the most out of API components. Programmable web is a source of information and news about Internet-based Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). In its database, approximately 16,590 APIs have been listed.

However, they lack a graphic interface and API testing requires testing for performance, reliability, functionality and security at the message layer. Such API calls can be automated by writing a script with a global variable. The token is issued by the first request, which will be stored in the global variable and hence subsequent API calls can be used.

 

Automation testing tools:

1.  Ranorex: It is a popular GUI-based test automation framework for mobile, desktop and web-based applications. Tests can be automated on Windows desktop and executed on virtual or real machines. Parallel testing is supported for cross-browser compatibility.

2. Appium: It is one of the popular open-source automated testing tools used for testing mobile applications for both Android and iOS versions. The main benefit of this tool is that it can be written once and run anywhere. One test script can be used for different platforms.

3. Selenium: One of the most popular test automation tools used exclusively for testing web applications. Selenium scripts can be easily written in popular programming languages such as Ruby, Python, Java, C#, JavaScript etc. For report generation and test case management activities, it can integrate with frameworks like JUnit. TestNG etc.

Conclusion: The potential of automated testing is no doubt tremendous. Hence, the team responsible for using test automation should understand the finer aspects of test automation and ensure that it is optimized to carry out the software product or application development process.