When it comes to using testing automation, the unique circumstances of your organization may make automating your testing processes more or less suitable. With all the benefits that come with automating your software testing, such as consistency and scalability, it’s likely been a consideration for you and your team prior to now.
Depending on the size, organizational structure, and internal as well as external circumstances surrounding your organization, automation could be the key to unlocking new business efficiencies and process modernization. In terms of tips and best practices for testing automation, we’ve created a detailed post on automation tips and best practices here. Below, we’ll dive into some specific use cases for when using testing automation makes sense.
Testing Consistency
At a high level, automation offers testing consistency. For users and organizations looking to reduce or eliminate human error, an automated script will run the same way repeatedly without the threat of error. A manual tester may forget a field or to process a particular element. In this case, using testing automation for the sake of reducing error makes logistical sense due to the consistency automation has to offer.
Increasing Scale
Another situation where testing automation should be leveraged is when organizations are looking to increase the scale of their testing efforts. By using automation and looping and data sourcing functions available with programming, a test manager can simulate thousands of permutations on any given application component or end-to-end process.
This allows for high traffic application functions to be vetted out with greater scope in the hope that all errors are caught prior to go-live. This type of testing scale is impossible for manual testers to perform, making automation the best choice in this case.
Time Reduction
Along with scaling up testing capabilities, time reduction in the testing process is another key benefit. Scripts can be executed outside of working hours and can be split up into parallel streams for additional speed. Automated tests execute significantly faster than manual testers could ever enter data into an application. The only limitation to the speed of automation is the operating system (OS) and network bandwidth to the testing environment, as well as the speed capabilities of the test environment itself.
With End-to-End Testing, automation scripts can pass values generated in one test along to the next testing script. This results in massive time savings and cuts out the communication chains usually needed within a testing team such as emailing and passing IDs from one person to another just to complete an end-to-end testing process.
It’s worth noting that since acceptance testing is usually performed by functional users to check the system before it goes live, we recommend this cycle not be automated if possible. The only case for incorporating automation into this type of testing phase is to generate IDs and testing assets for downstream lookup and validation by live users manually. Again, the goal here is for end-users to experience the system, spot-check functionality, and validate everything looks good before a go-live takes place.
Creating and refining both your automated testing strategy and practices can help reduce costs and free up employee hours. If you’re on the fence regarding automated testing, check out this comparison of Automated vs. Manual Testing: How Do They Stack Up where we’ll detail the specific advantages and drawbacks of both automated and manual testing and give you an accurate picture of which testing method best suits your organization’s IT department.
For more information on getting started with testing automation, visit our PeopleSoft Test Framework Services Page or reach out to [email protected] to connect with a member of our team. In the meantime, stay informed and read up on potential Barriers to Entry for Testing Automation here.