Test Automation

Over the years, application or software testing has become an integrated and continuous process of SLDC rather than being a standalone activity that is done at the end of the SLDC. C The software testing has evolved from exploratory and manual testing to continuous testing with the help of automation. 

While automation testing has reduced the time spent on testing significantly, it is associated with some problems. So, without any further ado, let us understand what test automation is in detail followed by the issues that it has and a reliable solution that we can go for.

What Is Test Automation?

Test automation takes a set of software testing activities and executes them via an automation tool or framework. The tool will run a set of tasks in a properly defined pattern. 

It aims at increasing the efficiency of testing by removing any scope for human errors, saving time, and improving test coverage. 

It is an undeniable fact that manual testing is a time-consuming and cumbersome process. Test automation can help in generating thousands of test cases within a very short time without causing tester fatigue. With ever evolving technology, test automation is a must have in 2023. 

Test Automation Challenges

While automated testing is a great way to reduce efforts and increase efficiency, it comes with some challenges.

• Upfront Investment: You need to analyze, design, and set up a framework for test automation, and it comes at a cost. The initial licensing, development, and operational costs can pose another huge burden.  
• Test Case Prioritization: With very short release cycles, there is very limited time for testing, test cases have to be prioritized based on multiple parameters. This prioritization is tough because one needs to focus on the quality of the test case, save time, and shouldn’t compromise at any point.
• Lack of Scripting Expertise: The QA team should be familiar with multiple programming languages in order to generate test cases which is a time-consuming process. 
• Emulating Real-World Scenarios: For comprehensive testing it is important to consider the real world scenarios. Covering all the possible situations is difficult and time consuming. 
• Device Fragmentation: This is the biggest challenge faced by any testing team. They need to check whether the application is compatible with different OS  and versions but the process isn’t that easy to do.

Test Case Maintenance: Maintaining the test cases is very important, and updating them from time to time as per the changes requires effort. This perhaps, is the biggest challenge because as per Webomates’ study creating test automation is just 20% of the effort, while 80% lies with the maintenance. Figuring out how to maintain these test cases is a hurdle for so many testers, but there is a solution.

Self Healing Test Automation

Self healing test automation is a technique of leveraging both artificial intelligence and machine learning to adapt application testing dynamically for any changes in the application interface or development environment. Some of its benefits are:

Looking for Faster Releases? See how Webomates’ AiHealing can help!

Self healing helps in maintaining the test automation process in a proper way however, infusing AI in test automation can make the self healing process efficient and faster.  As mentioned earlier, test case maintenance can take up 80% of a team’s time. Self healing processes enhanced with AI can help you automate your entire testing process without stressing yourself about its maintenance. Webomates’ patented AiHealing technology, takes the load of test case maintenance off your shoulders. Let’s see how it does that in the next section. Read for more about this blog : Test automation

Top 8 Intelligent Test Automation Trends To Look For in 2023

Intelligent Test Automation is the new fuel to software testing –  the use of Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning makes smarter and intelligent decisions at a higher efficiency. To be future ready, you need to embrace innovative and intelligent trends and tools.

Now before we dive into the intelligent testing tools, we need to understand what are the latest trends in testing and why we need these.

This is the first article in the series that covers the trends, and then the second article covers the tools that will help us.

The Changing Landscape of Software Testing

From being a standalone activity at the end of the development cycle, Testing has come a long way and now it’s embedded throughout the software development pipeline. Time to market is a key imperative to succeed in today’s competitive world. Any tool can help you test your application, but there is more to effective testing than that. 

The future of effective testing is dominated by the recent technological advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and insight-driven methods that help you right from the planning stage till execution. With rapid advancements in AI and ML, the future of testing is also evolving.

Today’s business needs

Today’s businesses have realized that using AI-ML powered Test Automation Tools have major impacts on the business outcomes, they are time saving and help you with faster and better quality releases. The trends and tools will help you and the business by:

The current trends in AI Testing

Many organizations have made AI-driven transformations and are making significant progress in driving use cases at scale. In the sections below, we take the categories that Gartner depicts for employing Intelligent Test  Automation in QA testing. Additionally, we have also added three more areas to expand the overall scope of Intelligent Test Automation.

Here are the current trends in AI testing that help deliver the business needs along with the delivery of flawless applications and enhanced user experience.

1. Model Based Testing continues to get better and better, decreasing the effort needed to create and maintain automation.

This is an application of model-based design where test scripts are automatically generated, executed, and checked based on formal specifications of the system under test.

Impact – Test Case and Test Script generation and healing improves 6X 

2. Test Insight is moving into mainstream and can help you shape and measure your testing efforts, quality and product life cycle.

They help you with test insights into the entire CI/CD pipeline to understand the impact every change is having on the product and provide guidance and strategic benefits to test management. 

Impact – Test Analytics or Insights improve decision making by 2X

3. Defect Prediction can help you save enormous amounts of time in diagnosing and triaging automation Pass/Fail.

Quality comes when you have proper defect triaging/reporting and no noise. The AI tools share an in-depth analysis of automation failures to help the teams reduce their triage time

Impact – 7% of Automation Fails are defects. Defect prediction improves Pass/Fail automation review by 10X 

4. Test Data Generation is the biggest challenge for ensuring an excellent testing process and many companies have been focused in this area and rapid advancements are being achieved. With the power of AI and analytics, you can generate data that comes as close as possible to your production data without revealing any sensitive information.

The AI based tools help you analyze a UI and identify a series of test cases that predict the user behavior. It also updates your test data based on newly added functionalities to the system along with the ability to identify and prioritize the test cases for execution.

Impact – Test Data Generation using AI is substantially faster and accurate.

5. Test Optimization is making the test process efficient without any quality compromises.

To speed up and optimize the testing in agile and DevOps environments, World Quality Report recommends a new option – the use of AI to optimize test cases.

AI systems are ideal for determining the area to test as well as the method to test and to failover.

Impact – Increased reliability and test execution speed.

6. Self Healing is the need of the hour as It helps teams to move from defect-based resolution to real-time issue resolution. It’s the ability to update the test cases and test scripts when the UI or API  changes.

The complexity of applications increases exponentially as new features are added to the existing functionality. The AI ML power combo can learn if there is a change made, and then automatically modify the test automation script to fix the problem.

Impact – 6 times faster to set up. 6 times faster to run and heal

7. API Testing is the latest trend in the testing community with organizations moving to cloud computing. as it emphasizes the testing of business logic, data responses and security, and performance bottlenecks. With teams moving to microservices architecture, the usage and testing of APIs are on the rise.

Impact – Saves a lot of hours and helps you uncover issues before they get bigger

8. Exploratory Testing has gathered momentum in recent years as it can help testers explore the application beyond the limits of scripted tests.

Exploratory Testing helps to reveal bugs that would go undiscovered during the structured phase of testing. It’s a simultaneous process where you can perform test design and test execution at the same time.

Impact – No disaster delivery! – Discover edge case defects and increase the test coverage leading to efficient testing.

Here’s an interesting whitepaper that talks about the software testing trends forecast and euphoria around Artificial Intelligence – Hype versus Reality. Along with the overall trends of Intelligent Test Automation that we just talked about, the paper dives into the insights and innovations developed by technologically dexterous companies and provides our estimate of the impact that using AI would have in the near term.

Conclusion

With applications becoming complex, teams often struggle with multiple challenges. For example, testing teams need to work collaboratively with the development team on every product release, identifying issues, and fixing them within timelines. With the world moving toward Agile and DevOps, the scalability to changing requirements becomes slow with inefficiencies and delays as teams lack necessary new-age technological skill sets.

With every organization embracing Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning technologies, CI/CD model, Agile and DevOps practices across all domains, the push for high quality product releases through rapid release cycles are at an all time high. Hence, these next-generation trends are exceedingly important for teams and organizations to accelerate the testing process. 

Now that you are aware of the latest trends, let’s look at the innovative tools that will help you jump start your testing.

If this has piqued your interest and you want to know more, then please click here and schedule a demo, or reach out to us at info@webomates.com.

If you like this blog series please like/follow us Webomates or Aseem.

How To Calculate The ROI Of Test Automation

 Understanding ROI in Test Automation

In the era of data-driven decision-making, leadership rarely invests a single dollar from the business budget without having a clear grasp of the projected returns. Agile teams in particular find themselves in the limelight, having to present their work and explain why test automation should be used together with other crucial tools.

The benefits of test automation extend beyond testers. Test automation also benefits the developers within each feature’s team as they too take an active part in test automation. It involves using automated testing tools and scripts to execute tests, compare actual results to expected outcomes, and report test results. This approach offers a plethora of benefits such as increased test coverage, faster test execution, and early defect identification.

This article explores the significance of test automation along with the formula to calculate Return on Investment (ROI). Additionally, it lists a comparative table of benefits obtained from test automation.

The Formula: Measuring ROI

ROI is a critical metric that evaluates the effectiveness of an investment. When referring to test automation, ROI weighs the costs involved in implementing and maintaining automated tests against the benefits gained from improved testing efficiency and quality.

You can use the following formula to calculate ROI.

While there are various factors that contribute to ROI, you’ll need to understand the cost and time benefits associated with test automation to use the formula. Also, it’s just a metric that gives you the approximate return value you can get by embedding an automation strategy into your QA.

Calculating Time Benefits : A significant aspect of ROI is how test automation contributes to faster time-to-market. Calculate the time saved through automation in test execution, test case creation, and regression testing. Not only does automation improve testing efficiency, but it also frees up valuable resources for more strategic and creative tasks.

Benefit	Impact of not using Automation	How does Automation save time?
Enhanced Productivity	Your developers and testers can have effort burnout due to the mundane and repetitive tasks	Automation tool has the ability to work 24*7, 365 days a year, and at war speed. Tools like AI Defect Predictor tool can help them reduce their defect triage time.
Faster defect identification	Traditional testing is left at the end where you need to deal with a whole load of bugs and critical issues post-development.	Shift Left testing provides an effective means to perform testing in parallel to development processes. Save enormous amounts of time in diagnosing and Defect Triaging
Enhanced test coverage	The application can be exposed to invalid inputs, unusual conditions, or unexpected events that are not covered while designing the test cases.	A combination of test cases-based testing, negative and edge case testing, and Exploratory Testing helps you increase the testing coverage, ensuring more comprehensive testing
Test Execution Time	Traditional testing will take weeks to execute and provide defect details to the development and testing teams.	Execute automated tests by running a suite of tests
Test case creation time	Creating test cases manually is a repetitive, time-consuming process and may require frequent updates as the application changes.	Create and maintain test scripts quickly compared to producing manual test cases
Regression testing time	Test cases keep changing due to a defect fix or feature change. You need to validate these changes in every build. This creates immense pressure on your testing teams.	Test automation can perform regression tests frequently and is carried out in 3 environments – Staging, Integration, and Development, to ensure that the existing application is not broken.

Calculating Cost Benefits : It’s important to account for all expenses related to automation. By assessing the potential cost savings, teams can make informed decisions about implementing the test automation. You can also consider both short-term and long-term savings, including reduced resoiurces costs and improved application quality.

Benefit	Impact of not using Automation	How does Automation save cost?
Initial setup costs	The expenses for acquiring tools, licenses, hardware, and infrastructure.	Streamlining IT infrastructure management like setting up the servers, configuring them, deploying the applications, and managing the load helps in avoiding any issues in the scalability and availability of the application
Maintenance costs	Automation scripts and infrastructure need to be continually updated to keep your automation ecosystem up-to-date and efficient	Self-healing mechanism helps you to reduce Test maintenance by learning if there is a change made, and then automatically modifying the test automation script to fix the problem.
Cost of fixing escaped defects	Post-release defects can be expensive and time-consuming to fix.	Teams can Shift Left to detect issues early in the testing lifecycle. By catching issues in pre-production testing, organizations can significantly reduce or eliminate defects. Fewer or no post-release defects result in cost savings related to bug fixes and support.
Infrastructure Cost	Teams need to perform manual configuration of individual deployment environments and this causes environment drift in the release pipeline.	Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is the management of infrastructure using code files. The teams can test the applications in production-like environments early in the development cycle, preventing configuration drift and errors that surface after the release.

Keys Points to Consider

Before you start calculating, you should be aware that it is quite challenging to arrive at quantifiable metrics. You need to approach test automation ROI as an estimation rather than an exact number.

The Perks of Embracing Cloud Testing

Testing as a Service enables the teams to focus on higher-value priorities like defect resolution and quality analysis. It creates test cases and test scripts and keeps them up-to-date. 

Unlike traditional testing, cloud-based testing resources can be dynamically scaled up or down as per the project’s requirements. In a time when software development workloads can be unpredictable and differ greatly between different projects, this adaptability is crucial. Overall, adopting cloud testing can result in better quality, faster time-to-market, cost savings, and higher efficiency for your applications. 

Partner with Webomates to get maximum ROI by implementing these principles.  

Connect with us to discover how you can redefine and transform your software testing with Intelligent Automation services. 
If you are interested in learning more about Webomates CQ service please click here and schedule a demo, or reach out to us at info@webomates.com

Best AI Test Automation Tool For Agile

 

Navigating Testing Challenges for New Ventures with Webomates CQ

As easy as it may sound, starting a new venture, especially when it comes to application development and testing, is filled with multiple challenges and roadblocks. New infrastructure, new development and testing tools and technologies, new partnerships, new customer segments, unknown costs — this complex terrain is uncharted.

Testing Challenges for New Ventures

Customer preferences are ever-changing. And new ventures must be agile and scalable in order to guarantee good user experience. That means, your development and testing teams must be agile and quick to respond to feedback.

Some of the common challenges faced by new ventures are:

• Low Production Quality: Working on new feature developments in a short sprinted Agile framework and releasing them to the end users with limited regression translates to False sense of Quality — leading to usability and customers’ dissatisfaction.
• Limited resources: Due to limited budgets and smaller teams, the quality of testing could be compromised.
• Time constraints: A rush to release features quickly can lead to inadequate testing.
• Lack of expertise: End-to-end testing requires domain experts
• Lack of scalability: Automation does not automatically scale with growth
• Testing Tools and Infrastructure: Acquiring and managing the testing tools and infrastructure can be very expensive leading to budget constraints.
• Lack of Continuous Testing: Implementing testing in line with a fast-paced development cycle can be a significant challenge.

Rethink your business with Webomates

When competition is fierce, your success depends on your level of innovation and time to market. So, how can teams make the most of today’s unique opportunities, while mitigating the accompanying risks?

Cloud testing has become an urgent imperative for creating a sustainable advantage for teams, as it can ensure resilience, faster customer feedback, speed, and overall cost reduction.

Our goal…

Making sure applications don’t just ‘work’ but are defect-free and deliver seamless user experience.

Our Solutions…

Explore how high-impact intelligent test automation solutions can enhance your processes and boost your team’s productivity.

Your benefits…

Webomates comprehensive portfolio of solutions and services is designed to help you rethink the complexity of modern testing and unlock new levels of performance, like:

Features that help Webomates stand out among the Automation Testing Tools/Services are:

• Modern Testing

Having attained the AWS DevOps competency status helps Webomates embrace DevOps. Its Continuous Testing solution helps accelerate your team’s feature velocity and ensure rapid and frequent quality releases.

• Test case-based testing with exploratory testing

As test case-based testing follows a predefined script, there are chances that a bug may not fall in the script’s scope. When you combine the strengths of exploratory testing on top of test cases, you expand the scope of the test ensuring you uncover all defects.

• Quick Regressions

Each release of a new product or enhancement to an existing release increases the complexity of testing and effective regression testing can greatly mitigate the business risk.

• AI Healing

Did you know that 80% of the testing time goes in maintaining the automation? Our patent pending AI-Healing uses AI and ML algorithms to dynamically adjust their behavior based on the changing environments. The system can identify the false positives and also self-heal the false positives without human intervention and run the test within the same cycle. Remarkably, this entire AI healing healing process takes just hours, not days or weeks. And the automation is always up to date.

• Accelerated Feature Velocity

Feature velocity gives an indication of how fast new features can be added to a product. Story points to measure the team’s current and expected deliveries. Automating the test case generation and execution process allows testing teams to focus on more critical and complex test scenarios, thereby increasing the team’s feature velocity.

• Smart and Auditable Reporting

Our smart reporting includes detailed testing results and comprehensive analysis along with actionable triaged defects. This provides the stakeholders with a deeper understanding of the testing results, making it easier to make data-driven informed decisions and prioritize actions.

This is particularly useful across industries with strict compliance requirements, such as healthcare or finance, where a clear audit trail of all testing activities is necessary for regulatory and compliance purposes.

Client Success Stories

Our scale of collaboration and testing capabilities enable us to address vulnerabilities quickly or prevent them entirely. We have 9 patented AI tools and human expertise always at hand to help you. We have helped our esteemed clients achieve tremendous benefits by implementing these solutions.

• We helped Rackspace Technology, Inc. test 14 IT applications on browsers, mobile, and API. They observed a remarkable 90% reduction in year-over-year production defects, coupled with an impressive 11-fold increase in feature velocity.
• We enabled TMRW to begin testing the MVP of its Automated Cryo Specimen Management Platform for IVF. The auditable reports generated by our platform facilitated the achievement of FDA approval for their product.
• Webomates has successfully completed SBIR Phase 1 and Phase 2 with the US Airforce, by demonstrating the ability to help organizations achieve scalability and agility while overcoming the typical traditional testing bottlenecks.

Take the first step, make the move!

Despite recent major advancements in AI technologies, only a few teams have made use of them. Adopting AI and ML-powered automation solutions will drastically transform your operations because they offer such a wide range of benefits related to Intelligent Automation.

AI is there to help you increase your efficiency! Introduce your team to AI Testing for improved efficiency and speed up your software delivery!

Please reach out to us at info@webomates.com to learn more about our AI-powered software testing solutions and how it can help you improve your business outcomes!

Tag: AI test automation, AI Testing, Artificial Intelligence, Automation Testing, Best AI test automation tool