The Role of Automation in Functional Testing

“Testing has to be an integral part of developing software and not a separate phase. When this approach is taken, product quality is owned by everyone on the team.” — James Sivak

A few years ago, Knight Capital Group, trading on an average 3.3 billion shares a day, incurred a trading loss of $440 million because of an incorrect software update. In today’s digital economy, the importance of thorough testing of the software before it goes live cannot be emphasized more. Any failure on this part can not only result in losses but also could severely damage a company's reputation, brand, and business. Such negative image could also cause user migration. It has, therefore, become all the more important to strictly follow the approach of test early, test often.

What Is Functional Testing?

According to a research report titled Set Your Sights on the Six Software Testing Targets by Info-Tech Research Group, to ensure the quality of end product, six types of tests can be used. Functional testing is a form of testing which tests the functionality of the application. It tests how the application executes various functions vis-à-vis the functional requirements and user expectations. These functions include various user actions, searches, user screens, data operations, business processes, and integrations. Functional testing is done based on the requirements, user stories, and acceptance criteria.

Automated Functional Testing: Benefits and Ensuring Success

In simple terms, automation testing is a technique that automates the testing process using scripts and suitable software. Once the scripts are ready, those are used to execute the test cases automatically to improve the overall test coverage and efficiency.

Businesses looking to expand their test coverage, save time and costs, retain the knowledge base, and aim for productivity improvement in testing opt for automation testing. While automated testing is not a magic wand which could completely replace the manual testing efforts. However, automated functional testing can dramatically improve the turnaround time, quality, and stability of the application.

To ensure that their functional test automation initiatives are successful, businesses need to ensure the following.

Understanding of the Application

Organizations need to ensure that the automation experts and the product experts or manual testing experts work very closely while automating the test cases – this is important because, to be able to create a robust test automation suite, the automation team needs to have a deep knowledge of the application functionality and understanding of its testing. In an ideal scenario, the manual testers or the product experts should be able to automate the test cases.

Know What to Automate

100% automation is practically impossible to achieve. It is important to choose the right test cases for automation with an aim to automate the critical functionality.

Test Automation During the Development

To get the true RoI from automated functional testing, businesses should ensure that the test automation is done while the application is being developed and it is not an afterthought after the application release. Having a strong test automation strategy early in the project lifecycle ensures faster time to market, better application stability, and more test coverage.

The Building Blocks of a Functional Testing Automation Strategy

The following are the important building blocks of a successful functional test automation strategy.

Right Mix of Skills in the Team

To ensure the success of your test automation strategy, you need the right expertise within the team, including the people who understand test automation, the people who have an in-depth understanding of testing, the product experts, and the stakeholders who can drive the strategy to align with the business goals.

Selection of the Test Automation Tool

While no tool will ensure the success of your test automation strategy on its own, selection of the right tool is one of the key decisions to make in the overall process. The next section describes more on how to select the right test automation tool.

Selection of the Right Test Cases

As mentioned earlier, one cannot aim for 100% test automation. The key lies in selecting the right test cases for automation. The ideal ones for automation are the business critical test cases (and hence should pass in every build), the test cases that are executed repeatedly, the test cases that are too tedious to execute manually, and the ones that are time-consuming.

Setting Up of the Test Environment

Ensure that you set up a test environment that is as close a replica of the production environment as possible — including the hardware and software configuration.

Execution of Test Cases

The strategy should define the execution process of the test cases. After execution, each test case should be assigned a status of Pass or Fail or Not Executed that defines the success criteria for the test case.

Maintenance of Test Suite

As new functionalities are added to the application, the automation test scripts need to be modified or new scripts need to be added. With each release, the test suite also needs to be upgraded. In order to improve the effectiveness of the automation, it should be easy to maintain the test suite.

Criteria for Selecting the Right Functional Test Automation Tools

While selecting the right test automation tool, businesses should consider the following critical aspects.

Availability of the Skillset

Test automation is a specialist job and most test automation tools require programming expertise. If your testing team has a majority of manual testing experts with no programming knowledge, you need to select scriptless test automation platforms.

Ease of Use

User friendliness should be one of the key criteria to consider during the evaluation of the test automation tool. It should be easy to create test scripts, test data, and re-usable components.

Automation Speed

The test automation tool should facilitate rapid test script development and allow the automation of test cases with complex workflows. It should also facilitate speedy execution of test suite. Accurate reporting and logging of the test execution play an important role in ensuring the success.

Technology Support

The automation testing tool should be able to support all the technologies used in the application under test — whether those include thick client applications, web-based user interfaces, web services, mobile applications, databases, file handling (like Word, PDF, XLS, text, XML), etc.

DevOps

If you are moving towards Continuous Delivery and hence towards continuous testing, then you need to ensure that the test automation tool which you select is able to seamlessly integrate with your Continuous Integration tools and infrastructure.

Reusability and Maintainability

The automation tool should support modularity and easy traceability of changes, which, in turn, ensures high maintainability of the test suite.

Collaboration

In today’s age of multi-location teams, it is important to ensure that your test automation tool supports real-time collaboration and helps in productivity improvement in testing.

Cross-Platform Support

The automation tool which you select should be able to execute the test suite across multiple platforms, operating systems, browsers, and localization environments.

Tight Integration with Development Ecosystem

To be able to really make an impact, the test automation tool should be completely integrated with the management, test management, defect management, continuous integration etc.

Powerful Reporting

The tool you select should provide robust reporting. It should be able to provide reports for every execution cycle for every suite and every test case, across multiple execution cycles, and across multiple builds. The reports should capture exact state of the software under test, during every stage of the execution. The right and clear reports help the stakeholders in making the right decisions.

The key to the success of functional test automation lies in selecting and implementing the right test automation solution, honing the skill-sets of the testers, defining the scope accurately, and continuously enhancing the test suite.