Future of Test Automation ~ Autonomous Test Automation Frameworks

Test automation has been for a while in the software development industry for sometime. There are enormous set of tools being developed which facilitates test automation and eases the software testing burden for a test engineer.   Tools such as Selenium are being commonly used in the industry when it comes to the world of automation testing.  There have been several commercial as well as non - commercial tools surrounding and supporting this norm. Test automation is not limited to functional automation. There are vast array of automation tools developed. There are tools which are bloomed in the areas of security testing, web services testing, mobile testing and UX testing.

Many organization have developed test automation frameworks based on these test automation tools. They have used the concepts of re usability and reportability. These are the core components that they have thought upon. The question they mostly ignore is "How we can go beyond?", "How we can extend ?", "How we achieve un-imaginative?". This is the time to think about how we can build the peaks based on the past foundations.

This is the future of test automation frameworks. Automation frameworks designed and developed in future will be more autonomous in future. There will be minimal intervention by the testing professional. The framework will act on its own for the automation task which its used to carry out. The test case which are written in simple steps will be transformed via artificial intelligence (AI). The natural language component of  AI will extract the relevant text and convert them to executable automation code which adheres to the test automation framework and standards. The automated bug reporting component will facilitate an intelligent way of reporting defects occurring in each test run via the bug reporting tool. The framework it self will report the issue and when the defect is fixed it will automatically close.  There are also integration with Continues Integration which will allow the automatic execution of scripts once the code is pushed by the developers. The next generation reporting is another unique feature of these autonomous frameworks. The reporting will be done via the organization's dashboard via the integration is done at the API level. There will be mobility level reporting such as sending text messages about the faliure or prompting via a native mobile app. The reportability can be also extended via an all in one reporting component which integrates reports of service level testing, function level testing, performance and security level testing.

These are some of the components that we can expect in future which will make the traditional automation frameworks can go beyond. The dream of artificial intelligent automation frameworks will become a reality near future.....