Staying ahead of the game: Why Test Automation is a Must-Have in 2023

 What and Why of Test Automation in Testing Landscape

Today, Technology and creativity know no bounds. AI, once regarded as science fiction and used as plot material for Hollywood movies, has become a near-ubiquitous technology that is enhancing our daily lives in our workplaces, homes, and across industries.

The market has been inundated with a steady stream of new digital products. The latest innovations have taken the IT world by storm. You can ask complex questions to ChatGPT and receive eerily humanlike responses. You also have a program called Codex that can write computer code; just describe the kind of software issue you’re attempting to fix, and Codex will provide a code solution in the form of a line of code.

The software testing industry too has undergone significant changes in recent years, with test automation becoming increasingly essential for organizations to remain competitive and deliver high-quality software. Test automation has become increasingly important for several reasons, including the speed and complexity of software development, the need for increased efficiency and accuracy, and the limitations of manual testing.

According to GMinsights‘ most recent analysis, Automation Testing is now valued at USD 20 billion and is anticipated to grow at a 15% CAGR between 2023 and 2032.

In this article, we will explore why test automation is so important in today’s software testing industry.

Harnessing Test Automation as a catalyst for change

You cannot talk about the latest practices like DevOps, Continuous Delivery and Continuous Testing without the term Automation.

Applications may have defects in their usability, security, performance, or any combination of those factors. And the inevitable result of this will be a decline in market share, revenue, and customer loyalty. Test automation provides the necessary speed and scale to ensure that software releases are delivered quickly and with high quality, allowing organizations to remain competitive and meet the demands of their customers.

Reducing process lead time and costs through automation of labor-intensive, repetitive tasks frees up human resources for their core competencies and revenue generating tasks. Additional benefits also include:

Top Challenges for making the move to Test Automation

Organizations are realizing the immense potential of intelligent automation – how it increases value and efficiency across business processes. However, few teams are finding it a grueling task to make the move.

The Tricentis Software Fail Watch report states that 314 companies were impacted by software failures, affecting 3.6 billion people and costing $1.7 trillion in lost revenue.

Test Automation has numerous benefits, but it comes with its own set of challenges:

So, how do we Implement a Good Test Automation Strategy?

Despite the fact that automation involves serious effort and dedication, success isn’t that difficult to achieve. The secret is to research, plan, and solve. One of the key needs for the industry is to provide the C-suite and organizations with a roadmap to accelerate, scale, and sustain automation testing adoption.

The Test Automation Strategy defines a framework for automated test scripts. It calls for automating tests at different levels. The foundation and bulk of this test automation pyramid are unit and integration testing. Service layer or API testing is the next step, where the API tests are run against the service layer.

The GUI tests, which are at the top of the pyramid, validate the application as a whole at the presentation layer. Top it up with exploratory testing that identifies potential edge cases. Unlike scripted testing, exploratory testing uncovers unique and out-of-scope defects that would have otherwise been missed.

Although implementing a test automation strategy requires significant time and resource commitment, the rewards can be enormous, including improved quality, lower costs, and greater efficiency.

By following these steps, you can implement a successful test automation strategy that meets your specific needs and helps you achieve your goals:

1. Define goals and objectives: Determine what you want to achieve with test automation and what benefits you hope to gain. Answer these 2 questions:

1. Which are the features that need testing?
   This defines the area of the application which will be automated.
2. What is the testing approach for each of the selected features?

Defining the scope will help keep all the teams on the same page.

• Assess your current testing environment: Evaluate your current testing processes, tools, and infrastructure to determine what changes need to be made to support test automation.
• Choose the right tools: Choose test automation tools that are appropriate for your specific needs and that align with your goals and objectives.
• Plan and design tests: Plan and design your test automation approach, including how tests will be written, executed, and maintained.
• Build and execute tests: Build and execute your test automation framework, including test cases and test suites.
• Monitor and maintain tests: Monitor the results of your test automation, including test results, performance, and stability, and make any necessary changes to improve the tests.
• Continuously improve: Continuously improve your test automation strategy by reviewing results, addressing any issues, and making changes as needed.
• Integrate with your development process: Integrate your test automation strategy with your development process, including continuous integration and continuous delivery, to ensure that tests are run consistently and that results are available to stakeholders.

Types of Automation Tests

Depending on the project’s needs, the development process, and the testing effort’s objectives, different types of automation tests may be employed.

Let us look at the types of tests that can be automated and how they help test every aspect of the system enabling users to achieve a frictionless experience.

1. Unit tests – These tests are used to verify that individual pieces of code, such as functions and methods, behave as intended.
2. Integration tests – These tests verify how various components of the system interact with one another to make sure everything functions as it should. Integration tests may involve testing the interactions between different units of code, or between the application and external systems such as databases or APIs.
3. Functional tests – functional tests validate the functionality of the system as a whole, from the user’s perspective, involving testing the UI, APIs, and other functional aspects of the application to ensure that they work as expected.
4. Regression tests –  regression testing is re-running functional and non-functional tests to ensure that previously developed and tested software still performs after a change.
5. Stress tests – Load on the networks results in server outages and network failures. To enhance user experience, stress testing is important to verify the performance on all pages.
6. Performance tests – Performance Testing validates the performance and scalability of the system, including response times, resource utilization, and other performance-related metrics. It involves load testing, stress testing, and other types of testing to ensure that the system performs well under different conditions.
7. Security tests – Security testing validates the security of the system, including testing for vulnerabilities, data breaches, and other security-related issues. Security tests may involve penetration testing, vulnerability scanning, or other types of testing to ensure that the system is secure. Read for More about :https://www.webomates.com/blog/staying-ahead-of-the-game-why-test-automation-is-a-must-have-in-2023/

The Curious Case of Video Testing

 

Video services have gained immense popularity in the past few years. They can be broadly classified into two categories: Video Conferencing and Video Streaming aka broadcasting. Their demand has skyrocketed in the last few months when the world is under siege due to the prevailing pandemic.

Live video conferencing tools, like MS teams, Zoom, Google Hangouts, Skype, etc, are being used extensively these days for conducting meetings and scheduling web-based conferences.

The education field has started depending highly on various eLearning platforms, besides leveraging the video conferencing tools.

Equipped with smartphones and access to the internet, the rate of consumption of video on demand is overwhelming too, be it sports, music, movies, news, or documentaries. It gives the flexibility to watch videos on the move at the time of your choice.

The surge in demand and usage, in general, puts a high load on the content delivery and management infrastructure. In order to appease the current customer base and entice new ones, the product and service providers need to maintain & upgrade current infrastructure, besides introducing new measures to provide consistent and high-quality services. This gives rise to the need of having a good video testing process in place.

Why do we need video testing?

Imagine a scenario when an important point is being discussed in a meeting/class and the video gets paused, or the picture gets pixelated, or the voice is not clearly audible. It adversely impacts the whole user experience. 

The performance of the whole ecosystem of video services is vital for continued customer satisfaction and loyalty. Like every other technology, video testing is extremely important to ensure that the end-user gets maximum out of his/her investment in the tech he/she paid for. This task is considerably tough keeping in mind the rate at which the hardware (mobiles, televisions, tablets, etc.) are upgraded and the content demand keeps going up.

The video content is dynamic in nature, coupled with the wide range of receiving hardware makes it a challenging task. Hence, it is imperative to have a well-outlined video testing process in place.

Video streaming performance metrics

Video testing also aids in analyzing the impact of actual usage during peak times by measuring various performance metrics, thereby ensuring that the end-users can have an uninterrupted experience. These metrics form the baseline for video testing.

• Bit Rate: The pixelated picture and impeded speech are classic symptoms of low quality video streaming. Take a look at the following snapshot of stills from a video. It is easy to spot the difference in quality of both.

Ever wondered why this happens? The culprit is “Bit Rate”. The video quality is directly proportional to the bit rate. Higher the bit rate, better the quality, consequently larger the video file size.

Bit rate is measured as the number of bits transmitted per second. A higher bit rate does not necessarily translate into better quality viewing on the receiver’s end if the hardware is not equipped to process that.While bit rate can determine the quality of audio-visuals in terms of looks, it has another comrade called, Frames per second (FPS), which determines the smoothness of the video. Just imagine watching an intense sports live and the player moves around in spasmodic choppy motion because the frame rate was not ideal. Higher frame rate means smooth videos with crisp detailing.

 

• Buffer time/fill: Quite often we see the video buffering message on our screens before it can start playing. 
  Have you ever thought about why this happens? Internet speed and reliability of connection is the prime reason. If the internet connection is slow, then the local buffer is filled with data before playing the video, so that there is no lag in the stream.Buffer fill is the time taken for the video file to fill the buffer. Longer the time is taken for buffering, a higher chance of having a dissatisfied end user.

• Lag length: So now the buffer is full and the video starts playing. All goes well as long as the download rate matches pace with the bit rate.

 

But the moment, buffer starts getting drained, the video stalls and re-buffering starts. This leads to a lag in streaming.
Commonly known as time taken for re-buffering, this phenomenon is measured by lag length. Lag length is the time taken to refill the buffer.

 

• Play Length: Play length is the measurement of data streamed by the data center and received by the end-user. There might be users who consume volumes of video data. Play length helps in understanding the capacity of the infrastructure, enhancement planning, and streaming demand patterns.

• Lag Ratio:

This is the ratio of waiting time: watching time. The moment this ratio is skewed with waiting time exceeding watching time by a high degree, it is time to revisit and fine tune the setup.

Nuances of Video Testing

Several scenarios have to be considered while planning for video testing. The following points are just a few examples that can be used as verification guidelines while embarking on the journey of test case planning.

These are just some examples. A lot more scenarios can be conjured up for video testing. Fiddle as much as you can with the various functionalities and come up with test cases. 

Keeping in mind the above sample scenarios, manual testing and visual analysis with human intervention becomes an obvious choice.  However, manual testing is time-consuming and has its own limitations when it comes to repetitive testing. That’s where automation helps. Tools like Selenium, Ruby, and Jscript can be used for video testing automation. However, it is vital to ensure that the stakeholders get the best ROI from automation.

The success of automation testing is highly dependent on the infrastructure generating and transmitting the content as well as the recipient. Testing for recipients can be done on the basis of the target audience and sample data generated from it. Moreover, the test environment can emulate the real setup to a certain degree. Device and target environment diversity may pose a challenge in automation since video testing needs to address a variety of endpoints with different configurations. Also, it is important to ensure that the automation scripts are reusable and maintainable.

Adaptive bitrate streaming is a way of adjusting the video quality depending on the user’s device and network connectivity. This may pose a challenge while testing the system and may lead to inaccurate testing results.  Read for more Information :https://www.webomates.com/blog/video-testing/the-curious-case-of-video-testing/

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