Developing quality software at a pace the world moves in a competitive manner is difficult. Often software products don’t attain targeted success, on-time delivery, and on-cost budgets if they rely only on Manual testing processes. Automated software testing improves the speed at which software is being tested and partners with manual testing to meet product quality expectations and launch deadlines.

Definition: Automated software testing

Wikipedia defines Test Automation or Automated Software Testing as “…the use of special software (separate from the software being tested) to control the execution of tests and the comparison of actual outcomes with predicted outcomes. Automated software testing can especially improve the test coverage when new functionality is frequently launched and repetitive testing of existing code-base is required. Though initially, automated software testing requires more effort soon you will yield greater benefits.

Why automated software testing?

Faster go-to-Market cycles

Increases in test coverage

Saves Money and time

Provides Accurate test results

Test scripts can be reused to run tests across multiple PCs with various configurations.

Identifies defects sooner in your testing cycle

Offers test reports to have effective communication with development team

Improves applications’ overall quality across platforms and devices

What Automation Does that What Manual Testing Cannot?

Test with Large number of users

Automated testing comes in handy when testing applications for its performance load where one can simulate tens, hundreds or thousands of virtual users interacting with web applications at any point in time.

Repeated tests on time

The main area in software development processes is on-time delivery. Testing Automation ensures repeated tasks are done quickly, and saves resource cost in the organization especially when applications are tested across 1000s of browsers 750+ mobile devices.

Helps both developers and testers

Automated testing helps developers to catch the problems earlier in the development life cycle when they do changes in coding. It saves time for both the developers and testers. It is not possible in manual testing.

Selecting an Automation Tool

There are different range of automation testing tools available for Performance testing, functional testing, regression testing, etc. The automation of tests starts with increased effort, but the allied aids will quickly pay off. Here are some factors that have to be considered before selecting an automation tool.

Continuous Integration testing

In this methodology, testing is done in small increments like a production environment with code integration and aggregation happening at frequent intervals. This kind of method approach helps the testers to identify bugs early, measure the impact of a change and determine whether it actually meets consumer’s expectations. Read about Testing Strategies for Continuous Delivery

Factors that have to be considered before selecting a testing tool