Automated testing is gradually replacing part of manual testing as it saves time and improves testing quality. Especially in the case of regression testing, automation can increase efficiency in several ways. Doing repetitive testing manually is a waste of time and resources. Also, there is some margin for error as repeated testing may miss, but the chances of errors occurring in automation are small. But what is automated testing? In simple terms, automated testing is a system that replaces human operations by repeatedly performing predefined actions to execute test cases. To get the most out of automation, it is imperative to choose the right automation testing tool.
It is critical to test your applications to ensure they work correctly. While important, software testing can be an iterative process that requires time and resources that you might prefer to spend on the task of delivering innovation for functionality or performance. This is what test automation is all about. There are well-defined best practices for automated testing, and automated testing is critical for your team if you:
- Repetitive tests, tests that run in multiple builds
- Tests prone to human error
- Tests requiring multiple datasets
- Frequently used features that introduce high-risk conditions
- Tests that are impossible to perform manually
- Tests run on several different hardware or software platforms and configurations
- Testing that takes a lot of effort and time when testing manually
Types of automated testing tools
Record and Replay: Tools in this category provide recording options for automated scripts. Every interaction on the screen, such as tapping, scrolling or typing, will be recorded and converted into an automation step. Recorded scripts can be replayed to perform actions and verify.
Coordinate Based Identification: Such tools interact with the application under test with the help of x/y coordinates to automate and verify the application.
Native Object Recognition: Tools that use native object recognition detect UI or control elements on a given element tree. The tree is built from XPATH, XML or CSS to identify elements, validation and automation scripts.
Text Recognition: Text Recognition: Text Recognition or (OCR) Optical Character Recognition tools recognize elements based on their text. These tools use visible text to drive automation and validate applications.
Image recognition: These tools take screenshots of UI elements in the product to add to automation scripts. These screenshots will help AUT to automate.
Many test automation tools support multiple identification methods, which can be useful for obtaining more robust automation scripts. Let us now look at the factors to consider when choosing an automated testing tool.
What are the automated testing tools?
- Selenium WEB automated testing
Selenium is the most popular open source automated testing framework for web applications. Originated in 2000 and continuously improved for more than 10 years, Selenium has become the choice of many web automation testers, especially those with advanced programming and scripting skills. Selenium has also become the core framework of other open source automated testing tools such as Katalon Studio, Watir, Protractor and Robot Framework.
Selenium supports multiple system environments (Windows, Mac, Linux) and multiple browsers (Chrome, FireFox, IE and headless browsers (no interface)). Its scripts can be written in various programming languages such as Java, Groovy, Python, C#, PHP, Ruby and Perl.
Because of the flexibility of Selenium, testers can write various complex and advanced test scripts to deal with various complex problems. It requires advanced programming skills and efforts to build automated test frameworks and libraries that meet their needs.
- Appium App automated testing
Appium is an open source tool for mobile automation testing, supports iOS and Android platforms, and supports Python, Java and other languages, that is, the same set of Java or Python scripts can run on iOS and Android platforms at the same time. Appium is a C/S architecture, and the core is a Web server, which provides a set of REST interfaces. After receiving the connection from the client, it will monitor the commands, then execute these commands on the mobile device, and finally return the execution results to the client in the HTTP response.
- Jmeter interface test, performance test
Apache JMeter is an open source Java desktop application mainly used for load testing of web applications. It also supports unit testing and limited functional testing.
It has many good features, such as dynamic reporting, portability, powerful testing IDE, etc., and supports different types of applications, protocols, shell scripts, Java objects, and databases.
- Postman interface test
Postman provides powerful Web API and HTTP request debugging. It can send any type of HTTP request (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE…), and can attach any number of parameters and Headers. Not only that, it also provides import and export of test data and environment configuration data. Paid Post Cloud users can also create their own Team Library for team collaborative testing, and can share their test favorites and use case data with the team .
- SoapUI interface test
SoapUI is a very popular open source API test automation framework for SOAP and REST. It also supports functional testing, performance testing, data-driven testing and test reporting.
- Monkey Stability Test
The software comes with the sdk and is suitable for android and ios. Through the adb shell, pseudo-random events of the user or the system are generated.
Stress test results: crash crash, no response anr. Basic command: adb shell monkey 1000
- Robot Framework WebUI automated testing, interface testing
Robot Framework is an open source automation framework that implements a keyword-driven approach for acceptance testing and acceptance test-driven development (ATDD). Robot Framework provides a framework for different test automation needs. However, its testing capabilities can be further extended by implementing additional testing libraries in Python and Java. Selenium WebDriver is a commonly used external library in Robot Framework.
Test engineers can utilize Robot Framework as an automation framework, not only for web testing, but also for Android and iOS test automation. For testers familiar with keyword-driven testing, Robot Framework can be easily learned.
- QTP Web automated testing
QTP is an automatic testing tool. The purpose of using QTP is to use it to perform repetitive manual testing, mainly for regression testing and testing new versions of the same software. Therefore, you should consider how to test the application before testing, such as those functions, operation steps, input data and expected output data to be tested.
QTP is aimed at GUI applications, including traditional Windows applications, and now more and more popular Web applications. It can cover most software development technologies, is simple and efficient, and has the characteristics of reusable test cases. These include: creating tests, inserting checkpoints, validating data, enhancing tests, running tests, analyzing results, and maintaining tests.
- LoadRunner performance test
LoadRunner is a load testing tool for predicting system behavior and performance. LoadRunner enables testing of entire enterprise architectures by simulating tens of millions of users implementing concurrent loads and real-time performance monitoring to identify and troubleshoot problems.
Enterprises using LoadRunner can minimize testing time, optimize performance and accelerate the release cycle of application systems. LoadRunner can be applied to automatic load testing of various architectures, predict system behavior and evaluate system performance.
- Jenkins continuous integration
Automate build compilation, deployment, task execution, test report, email notification, etc.
Platform support
Are you looking for automated testing tools for web applications or mobile applications? If it’s a mobile app, is it hybrid, native or PWA? In many cases, the scripting language is also an important factor, since not all languages are supported by mobile automation testing tools. Therefore, UFT is not recommended for test automation if you develop applications using JavaScript. In this case, use a scripting language flexible tool like Selenium. There are many test automation tools that support freeware frameworks like Selenium and Appium. Framework integration helps reduce testing effort and increases collaboration between teams. Tool integration forms an ecosystem of collaborative efforts to aid in object recognition, error logging, test case management, report sharing and shared repositories.
Ease of adoption
Ease of adoption can be measured in terms of the skills and learning curve required to use the tool. If there are resources available on the internet to easily learn what the tool does, then that’s a plus point. Also, community support should be good, and it would be an advantage if there was an active community with an overview of the intricacies of the tool. We have observed that some tools and frameworks have a lengthy learning curve to install as well. But overall, teams should be able to use the tool with ease given their skills or experience.
**Ease of scripting **
Most automated testing tools offer flexible scripting options. It allows testing teams to write test scripts in their preferred language. A good test automation tool helps to increase the reusability of test components and provides the flexibility of scripts that can be reused across projects. Scripting time with object identity, script execution speed, support for CI/CD tools like Jenkins, these attributes are usually considered before choosing a tool.
Integration method
If the test team is using test case or management tools, the team will gravitate toward automation tools that can be easily integrated into these tools. It helps to properly manage the application development life cycle. A keyword-driven or data-driven automation framework should be easy to integrate into any data source. It would be handy if the tool easily provided connectivity to different data sources.
Test analysis
Analysis reports form the basis of test automation as it provides traceability to the process. Automation tools must provide customizable dashboards to view different types of reports shared between various teams. Traceability with real-time reporting ensures functional verification and efficient test coverage. Quality metrics such as test progress, defect density, and test execution status allow you to maintain quality at every stage of continuous testing. It is very convenient to use good automated tools to analyze the results to identify errors and perform root cause analysis.
License types and fees
It’s best to choose an open source tool, but not every open source automation tool has all the features you might need. Even if you choose a proprietary licensed tool, you need to figure out how much you need to spend on maintenance. Some companies offer live support and training for premium programs. Therefore, you may need to upgrade to take advantage of these services. If you just want to perform automation on a different computer, there is also something called a runtime license. In addition to this, there are options for a node-locked license for a single computer and a concurrent floating license for using the tool on multiple systems.
Summarize
Generally speaking, automated testing is an extension of testing ideas, providing a “tentacles” for test engineers. Its situation can be regarded as a special tool, but in essence, automated testing is still a kind of thinking. By the way, automated testing in a narrow sense refers to GUI-based automated testing, and unit testing and API testing, have you ever thought about how to do it manually without using any special tools? So they naturally fall into the category of test automation. The most real advantage of automation is that it is easy to find a job: a test engineer (not myself) found an interesting phenomenon. Almost all the testing positions she has applied for require automation testing experience when recruiting. But when she started working, she found that such companies were trying to do automated testing, but most of the results were not very good. However, although she is involved in some cup projects, she can always pack this kind of cups into washing utensils for the next interview. Opportunities only favor those who are prepared. This is a society that relies on real skills. Sometimes, the reason why you develop poorly is not because there are no opportunities, but because you are not ready, causing opportunities to pass you by. If you want to learn, it’s never too late to start, instead of looking forward and backward, you just need to do your best and leave the rest to time!
Copyright statement: This article is an original article of CSDN blogger “Qingliu in the Testing World”, which follows the CC 4.0 BY-SA copyright agreement. Please attach the original source link and this statement for reprinting.
Original link: https://blog.csdn.net/m0_68405758/article/details/124985972