Test Automation in The Modern Era

Test automation has become one of the key areas in Quality Engineering these days. This is also a key skill area that a test professional should posses when he is to enter the software test industry. This is not just limited to engineers, its also essential for test managers and quality heads who work for application design, develop and delivery organizations.

Test automation as we speak has now reached its peak stage and there are numerous test automation tools available in the market which is commercial or open source and free in nature. When we say test automation, Selenium comes to our mind as we start our baby steps in test automation with Selenium test automation tool. We try to do everything with Selenium.

Its not the case now. Everything is changing. Even the way applications are developed and delivered in the industry.

We now tend to deliver applications based on web services. Some of the software vendors just deliver software only as web services and some as a cluster of web services known as micro services. Testing such applications we cannot utilize a tool like Selenium as it is designed to automate Web UI functional test. For these application we utilize tools such as REST Assured. The new changes has caused us to change the way we automate and we cannot use REST Assured alone. Increased use of Behavior Driven Development has also led test automation to amalgamate BDD practice. Therefore we may have to use a tool like Cucumber into our REST Assured framework. Some of us also started to look into tools like Karate which is also a great flexible tool that allows us to create automated web services test suites with plain English language, rather than worrying too much on coding.

Another area that we should concentrate in this modern era is to look on automation of AngularJS websites. More and more web applications are being dynamic and they tend to use ajax controls. Traditional Selenium has some compatibility issues when automating such AngularJS solutions. There are so many tools developed on Selenium which are called wrapper tools. NodeJS has contributed to this a lot. WebDriver.IO, WebDriverJS, WD, Cabbie, Protractor are some of these tools that we should look into when we automate such dynamic content sites.

There are also lot of automation tools coming up with code-less nature. This is a highly demanded area where a person who are less knowledgeable on test automation coding can engage upon test automation with such code-less automation tools. Test Craft, Leap Test, Testim.IO are some of the tools which facilitates code-less test automation.

The dream of artificial intelligence and machine learning on test automation has also come into light. While glancing through the current test automation tools, I found out that there are already AI based test automation tools in the industry. Appavance IQ is one of a tool that came across where just giving the URL of the site, it will come up with the necessary automation scenarios.

We should also look at more on new automation frameworks which uses multiple set of automation tool libraries like Robot Framework, Gallen and RedWood HQ. Robot Framework is developed in Python as looks on automating Mobility, Web, Desktop with its array of libraries.

We should also look at framework level integrations. We may have to execute our test automation suites in cloud test environments like Browser Stack, Sauce Labs, Lamda Test, AWS,etc. Therefore framework integration points should be known with such solutions. We may also have to look on amazing reporting frameworks such as Allure reporting, ATU reporting, Vigo Reporting which gives amazing charting and reporting facilities. Integrations with cloud dashboard solutions should be also researched as the automation frameworks should be integrated with such solutions.

Day by day test automation is becoming challenging and so we as professional should also look into these challenges and improve our knowledge.