Today, we will be looking at automated testing.
The importance of testing software
Software testing is part of the development process and serves to check the software for various defects and eliminate them. There are a variety of helpful tools that can be used to perform testing manually or automatically.
Software testing is an important phase in the overall software development cycle and should be performed continuously. Ideally, software testers should be integrated into the development process from the outset. Thanks to their experience, common development errors can be avoided right from the start.
Customers will only be satisfied with software if they receive a solution that is largely free of bugs, perfectly usable from a usability perspective, and unlikely to fail. For this reason, software testers and developers work closely together at Vialutions.
The difference between manual and automated testing
In manual testing, people perform the tests themselves step by step without the use of automation technologies, whereas in automated testing, tools and scripts are used to perform tests repeatedly and automatically.
This allows, for example, the monotonous and repetitive work of “clicking through” software or apps to be done by a computer. Instead of the tester opening the software themselves, logging in, or opening a website, for example, this is done by the respective tool, which in turn follows a list of predefined instructions. Examples of such instructions can be: “Find the login button,” “Enter password xy,” “Click on the login button,” etc.
Advantages of automated testing
The major advantages of automated testing lie in its speed, efficiency, and accuracy. Our tester Bernhard sums it up as follows:
“The computer doesn't get tired of clicking through the same steps over and over again because it hasn't had its coffee yet. It also completes most tasks much faster than a human could.”
Testers can get tired or lose focus, which can lead to overlooked errors or inconsistent results. In addition, automation technologies make it possible to perform tests with hundreds of samples instead of just a few. This leads to a big gain in scalability. Automation is particularly suitable for regression testing, where the same test cases have to be run over and over again. Automated tests can also be run on multiple platforms, devices, and browsers simultaneously, which would be very time-consuming to do manually.
Disadvantages of automated testing
Disadvantages can arise in terms of test accuracy. For example, if you want to test a SharePoint page, the entire test depends on the external service and its speed. If this service randomly takes longer to respond, automated tests may be aborted for no apparent reason and unnecessarily. This means that tolerances for the tests must be adjusted, which in turn has a negative impact on speed.
Another limitation is coverage: not all test cases can be automated in a meaningful way, e.g., usability tests or tests that require human intuition. Manual testers can react spontaneously to changes or unexpected behavior of the software and perform exploratory tests. For small projects or new software that changes quickly, manual testing can be a practical and cost-effective solution.
In other words, automated testing is very useful for positive test cases that prove functionality (“happy path testing”), but negative test cases are more difficult to map.
Challenges in automated testing
When it comes to automated testing, it is particularly important that everything being tested is deterministic. For example, if you go through the same steps 20 times in a fixed order, you will usually get the same result 20 times. This is usually a given with normal software, but with websites that depend on external services or certain types of games, this may not be the case.
There are also features that should be considered when choosing test software. For example, it is very helpful for debugging tests if the software allows the tester to rewind and fast-forward the completed test “frame by frame” like a video in order to see and understand why a test did not deliver the expected result. However, this function inevitably requires the software to take a “snapshot” of the entire page after each step so that it can restore the state at any point in the test and allow you to rewind and fast-forward.
When testing websites in isolation or individual components, this is usually not a problem. However, if a page depends on external services and the testing software does not offer an option to exclude its static content from the snapshots, the required memory may quickly exceed the available memory, forcing you to disable this feature.
Special features like this should be taken into account when choosing test software, because just because a test software is “industry standard” does not necessarily mean that it is suitable for every application.
At the end of the day, it doesn't help testers if the software has a 50/50 chance of failing during testing simply because the memory consumption has been exceeded again. In this case, an alternative without “back and forth” and with guaranteed stability would be a reasonable choice.
Conclusion
Automated testing is particularly well suited for large, complex projects that require frequent regression testing and rapid release cycles. Manual testing, on the other hand, is better suited for smaller projects, exploratory testing, or areas where human intuition and experience are important. In practice, many teams use a combination of both approaches to maximize the benefits of both methods.
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