Ways To Expedite Your Test Automation

Test automation has always been the talk of the town in the field of software development. With the changes in software development methods, the field of test automation is rapidly catching up with these changes in the industry. To tackle this, engineers are coming up with innovative and novel solutions to address customer demands and implement the principle of - delivering more, delivering early. Thus, in order to achieve this, organizations will have to adopt the latest practices, which not only will help these companies in being compliant with the latest technologies but also make them more competitive in the market.

So, to help you accelerate your test automation journey, this blog brings you 10 different ways to increase the speed of test automation and achieve greater efficiency.

Let’s get started!

There are many ways to speed up test automation including

1. Early automation
2. Predictive analytics and Progressive automation
3. Self-healing automation
4. Continuous testing?
5. Parallel execution
6. Distributed execution
7. Codeless automation
8. Artificial intelligence
9. Robotic process automation?
10. Hyperautomation

1. Importance of Early automation?

Faster time to market is one of the important criteria for organizations while building a product. To support these changing market trends, test automation strategies have to be updated on a regular basis. One of the strategies can be to start test automation early which will always give you an edge in achieving your automation goals. The early automation approach involves the test automation team in the early stage of the test life cycle and the team can then plan better to implement the automation strategies.

Early automation comes with advantages like?

• early defect detection,
• introducing testing flexibility
• decreasing project costs.?

Companies are now adopting this approach and have seen a massive improvement in their product deployment time.?

2. Predictive analytics and progressive test automation

As a tester, you must always have a holistic approach to solving the problem of test automation.? Predictive analytics and progressive automation are strategies to expedite the process of test automation.?

In progressive automation, code development works hand in hand with the development of test automation scripts. Whereas, in predictive analytics, we follow a proactive approach to QA automation in which testers can predict the areas of automation which in turn helps to plan better and accurately.?

A progressive automation strategy, allows organizations to shorten the time cycle for testing and helps in increasing coverage of testing in terms of requirements.?

3. Self-healing automation

As newbie automation testers we all have been through the pain of failing test scripts. Every time a component is modified or changed these scripts fail. This is where self-healing automation comes to the rescue. It is one of the important concepts in test automation as it is expected to handle the challenge of frequently changing UI of web applications.?

In self-healing test automation, if your test fails while you are executing your tests, or in case you get unexpected results, the script will heal the broken test automatically. This works because in self-healing automation the automation tool takes control and captures properties of the missing objects and based on analytics, predicts the most probable object you are looking for. The tool then continues the scripting process using the new object properties and updates the repository for future use.

This type of test automation helps in increased efficiency and saves time as testers have to run multiple iterations.?

5. Continuous testing

In the early days of test automation when the waterfall model of software development was in trend, one had to wait longer to start the test execution cycle which would cause a heavy loss of time. This is not the situation anymore. With continuous testing, the product is evaluated throughout the entire Continuous Delivery (CD) process which helps in providing immediate feedback to the development team. This mechanism further helps to quickly mitigate as many risks as possible throughout the development cycle.?

Continuous testing thus becomes necessary to build quality products in a quick time.?

Continuous testing benefits:

• Increases efficiency of testing.
• It is more agile.
• Helps in improving code quality.

6. Parallel execution

Work parallelization is a common practice in assembly lines when work is divided among different workstations. A similar strategy can be implemented while test execution.

We know how time-consuming sequential testing can get and so to overcome this drawback we need to execute our tests in parallel.?

This approach can help increase the test coverage and also save an ample amount of time for the user. In parallel execution, the test cases are simultaneously run on multiple combinations of devices and browsers.?

Many virtual devices are generally used for this as they enable you to simulate hundreds of testing environments on your device. Parallel execution helps to optimize your CI/CD process and is a cost-effective approach that must be adopted to save test execution time.

7. Distributed execution

Distributed test execution is now an offering by many test automation tools available in the market. As we are trying to test our application in the best possible way in the least amount of time, distributed testing can help in detecting defects quickly. In distributed testing, a test consists of several parts and each of them is executed on a separate computer which saves time, and execution is completed faster.?

It helps in the accelerated execution of regression tests.?

To implement distributed execution, all you need is the right strategy and the right tools that will help you increase test efficiency.

7. Codeless automation

Codeless automation is slowly picking up pace among testers and is one of the efficient ways to improve your test automation execution time. In Codeless test automation, one need not worry about writing code as the tools are designed to automate the process of writing test scripts. A Codeless automation strategy has low maintenance and high scalability.?

While codeless automation comes with some disadvantages like the use of manual coding for some tasks, a combination of codeless and code-based test automation can provide a powerful solution to your test automation needs.??

As per Future Markets Insights a market intelligence and consulting services company, the codeless testing demand is expected to increase at 15.5% CAGR between 2021 and 2031.

8. Artificial intelligence

The adoption of technologies like IoT, Quantum computing, Augmented and virtual reality, and others are leading to increased complexity in the field of software development and testing.

Adding to this the software development process is also going through massive changes.??

In such a scenario, the testing challenges faced by testers cannot be solved using traditional testing approaches and require novel ways to solve the problem. Using Artificial intelligence(AI) for quality assurance can be a way to tackle the issue.?

AI can be used for reasoning and problem-solving to help automate and reduce the amount of mundane and tedious tasks in testing. Similarly, AI can also increase the scope of test automation and create alerts to highlight repetitive tasks. You can use AI to find buggy modules in your application which in turn can be marked as high priority thus saving us from major failure.

9. Robotic process automation

The software market is driven by the growing need for automated technology and so Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is quickly gaining ground. RPA acts as a software robot that can mimic human actions and so can be utilized to execute a combination of tasks and processes with pre-defined business rules.?

The most important advantage of RPA is that it can deliver the desired result without human interaction. RPA is also beneficial as you can implement scriptless automation using RPA tools.?

As per Statista, the robotic process automation (RPA) market is forecast to grow with a CAGR of 27.7% from 2022 to 2030 and the market size is expected to be valued at 23.9 billion U.S. dollars by 2030.

10. Hyperautomation?

As per Gartner, Hyperautomation is a business-driven, disciplined approach that organizations use to rapidly identify, vet, and automate as many business and IT processes as possible. Hyperautomation is defined as an advanced process of automation using tools like Artificial intelligence, machine learning, event-driven software, robotic process automation, and other types of decision process and task automation tools.

This might seem a complex task but we have seen that the combination of the latest technologies like AI and RPA has yielded positive results in space of test automation. Apart from a reduction in cost and the overall time taken, hyperautomation testing can bring increased compliance.?

Hyperautomation advantage:

• Increased productivity: Once implemented, testers can focus on other tasks to improve their productivity.?
• Amplified benefits: With a mix of various automation technologies, the benefits are multiplied in hyperautomation.

Conclusion:

While achieving a hundred percent automation is not possible, a process-driven approach to automation testing is bound to yield quality results, as seen from the above-mentioned ways.

At times we can use a combination of these techniques or rely on a single technique. Based on the requirements and availability of resources, product owners need to take a call to implement the right test automation strategy and achieve maximum benefits from it.?

So to keep pace with the changing developments in the software field you need to adopt the latest technologies in testing or else you are bound to lag in the test automation market.