Bringing Efficiency Into Software Testing And Test Automation

By Author: TomWade
Total Articles: 34
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In order to maintain a competitive edge, organizations constantly need to improve their products. This also requires them to maintain the quality of their products. This increases the pressure on test automation framework with constant changes, shortened release cycles and reduced time allocated for testing but with uncompromised efficiency and effectiveness.

Generally, a high proportion of testing is usually dedicated to regression testing, which makes sure that the current system is still working even after new changes and enhancements. Such testing is generally tedious and prone to errors. Automation ensures that regression testing is performed with consistent quality within the available time. test automation frameworks help to increase the speed and efficiency while maintaining the product quality.

Some of the best test accelerating factors can be listed as follows:
- Hire experience testers. Many organizations start testing as an entry level job. As a result the testing process is not executed efficiently. Experienced developers and testers ...
... can foresee code defects and perform effective testing in lesser time.

- Facilitate interaction between the testers and developers. Better communication saves the nuances of email updates and creates a friendly environment for work. This benefit though not quantifiable, but is effective in the long run.

- The reporting system for testing should be independent. The testers should be made to report directly to the project manager and the business analysts. This helps the project manager to plan the development accordingly. This also involves the testers in the development cycle early on.

- Allocate dedicated testers into specific systems. This deepens the testers understanding of the system and how it needs to work for optimum results.

- Providing a practical business training to the testers allows them to get a real understanding of the business application that they are testing. It also enables them to identify potential loopholes in the system and suggest features for future enhancements.

- Testing mostly involves technical fiddling. Involving non-technical users into the process of testing provides a different perspective in finding out the performance issues of the software application.

- Many organizations prefer to run their testing phases directly in the production environment. This approach is faced with several limitations regarding security protocols due to which complete end to end testing is not possible. Hence, organizations need to proceed towards replicating the production environment to get an idea the software performance in the actual environment.

- The Agile and the DevOps methods have involved testing right from the requirement gathering stage. Practicing this approach helps to detect flaws early on and saves time in the long run.

- Equivalence class partitioning is a mathematical approach which helps in identifying additional functional requirements which may not have been articulated. It gives a good idea of the number of test cases required to test a system’s functional requirements. It is a way which can list all the ways a system can be used by a user.

Conclusion
The discipline of software testing is undergoing seismic shifts from a wide variety of perspectives. Tactical processes have now evolved into strategic exercises. Among them, understanding the user, the application, the economic resources, access devices, test automation framework result in a more comprehensive, aligned and faster testing cycles.