These days, with the acceleration that the business world moves at, the software industry has had to overhaul some of its methods. Entering a stage where the agility of processes and quality of products have become more relevant than ever. A stage characterized by the Software Test Automation.

One of the practices that allow efficient contribution to the quality assurance of a software product is Test Automation. The term may be familiar to you, but it’s worthwhile answering some general questions about it:

1. What does Test Automation mean?

Special software for administering tests automatically to determine if the results obtained in the development process of a software product achieve the goals. It helps to administer more tests in less time, reduce the human error margin and execution complexity.

Considering this, automating frequently administered test cases will help to eliminate manual difficulties.

2. How are the tests designed?

Before or after the software development starts they can be designed; depending on your practices and development process.

We recommend building the tests before, if the software needs to handle the dynamic in TDD (Test-Driven Development), also for unit tests, and BDD (Behavior-Driven Development) – for acceptance tests; but we’ll talk about that in other posts. Continuing with the recommendation; the first thing to do is design the test, and then code it.

Focusing on the test design: start reading and abstracting relevant information, verifying and determining the objective of the new functionality. Afterward pose possible scenarios.

3. Does Software Test Automation eradicate the need for manual automation?

Not necessarily; sometimes we can administer both in the same Project. This depends on the client, the resources, and the project, among other variables. Moreover, elements that cannot be tested in an automated way will exist.

4. What software is used to carry out Test Automation?

Different tools exist, but once again the answer is: it depends. On the application’s project and the programing language developed for. Nevertheless, we can state some examples: Cucumber, Selenium, Jasmine, Robot Framework, etc.

5. How can your software benefit from this?

With automation, it’s easier to attend to more scenarios. If you want to automate a test case, you do it just once and then you can reuse it to automate many other cases. In turn, it gives you a much wider and more complete perspective of the software quality.

Test automation ensures better quality, since executing more test cases will allow the product to be evaluated more desirably and completely.

Furthermore, the software with test automation allows daily efficiency and functionality, and not having to wait for the regression to become aware of any need for adjustment.

Remember that repairing a defect in the software when it’s already finished can end up being enormously expensive, so what could be better than having the chance to get to know its true reach, testing it several times along the way. Ultimately test automation significantly decreases the risk, improves the software quality, and allows for more efficient management of time and resources. All these factors directly affect and influence the expenditures of your company.

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