Continuous Testing with Test Automation Tools.

Continuous Testing is the strategical process of running automated tests in the DevOps pipeline. By doing this, We can get rapid feedback on the code or the feature and fix it as possible as we can before it reaches the production.

In the normal testing process in the SDLC, The software workflow goes team by team. Say, Developer to Tester to Release engineers. One team should wait for another team to finish its task. So the testing team should wait for the developers to finish their coding and developers should wait for testers to give their feedback about the code. This process takes time and makes other stakeholders wait for their time. So here we are compromising the delivery time for the quality software. In this article, we will discuss how continuous testing helps the rapid, on-time software release.

Before understanding the continuous testing, we need to understand Test automation and its framework.

Test Automation

Test Automation is the process of automating the software testing process using scripts and tools. These tools cannot be used in every phase of the software lifecycle. Let us analyze a report of test automation tool utilization in the software testing lifecycle.

Automated testing can be highly utilized in the unit testing phase. Then it is utilized little less in other testing phases like Integration testing, System testing, acceptance testing.

As we can see from the report of the test automation tool utilization, test automation tool utilization is decreasing in various stages of the software lifecycle. Test cases are automated easily in the unit test phase. But other phases need manual interventions and which will slow down the software delivery.

Let us see the timeline chart of the software life-cycle where only test automation tools are utilized.

As we see in the timeline chart of the software lifecycle, every team should wait for the response of another team. the KPI of Agile process metrics will go down.

Continuous Testing with test automation.

Now, Continuous testing is a strategy and test automation is about the process. Continuous testing with test automation will give an effective software development life cycle.

As described in the above picture, each and every small part of the development will be tested right after development is done. Say, we have three features to be developed for the particular sprint. Assume feature one is developed within a day and testing team need not wait for all the feature to be completed. The Testing team can go ahead and test the feature and meanwhile, other features will be developed and ready for the testing. This way, Developers get their feedback from the testing team continuously.

Let us see the same situation in the above timeline chart. As testers are starting their work right after the development and rapidly they are sending feedback to the developers and developers rapidly sending the fixed code, entire lifespan of the sprint will reduce. Followed by, DevOps continuous integration and delivery will help the sprint finish quickly. So we can finish the 10 days sprint in 6 days.

Continuous testing tools.

Now we know that continuous testing with test automation tools will reduce the help the amount of time in the software development life cycle. Now, what is the challenge? Creating test cases, developing scripts and developing test automation workflow is the challenge. In order to face the challenges, we need to concentrate on selecting the right tools for continuous testing.

Testsigma

Testsigma is an AI-driven continuous testing tool. This is available in the cloud SaaS Platform. This tool provides features like

• Requirement management,
• Manual and automated test case creation
• Test case execution on cloud and local devices.

Testsigma allows testers to write test cases in near simple English (Natural Language). So that tester need not learn programming language for writing test cases.

Selenium With Automation Frameworks

Selenium is another popular continuous test automation tool. This is an open-source solution and it is used by many testers. Selenium needs good programming skills and a big effort to build the automation testing framework with selenium. Stand-alone Selenium cannot create a complete automation testing framework. It needs other tools like Jenkins and integration to create complete automation framework. Learn Selenium from Ebooks.

UFT – Unified Functional Testing

UFT is another popular continuous test automation tool for functional testing. Some advantages of this tool are.

• Reusable test components.
• Automated documentation.
• Image-based object recognition feature

UFT is using Visual Basic Scripts for writing test cases for continuous testing. we cannot create a complete suite of continuous testing automation with UFT. This tool needs to be integrated with tools like Jenkins. Learn More about the UFT from the EBooks

IBM Rational Functional Tester

IBM’s Rational Functional Tester is supporting both storyboard testing and test scripting. This tool is one of the best tools for continuous test automation as it allows shift left testing to execute the test cases as early as possible in the development phase and it is allowing developers and testers to collaborate together so that bugs can be fixed as early as possible. Another main advantage of this tool is that it will allow tested to create a reusable test component that will be useful for Regression testing.

Learn software testing from the Ebooks

We will discuss more the continuous test and test automation tools in the future. Stay tuned and follow Digital Varys for more Technical articles.