Test Automation – A gain from manual testing best practices
Testing as a service, emerged and matured over a decade. For past 4 years, it completely transformed itself and changed the shape, magnitude and direction. There was a need to reunion the testing and development along with DevOps, test automation has taken new avatar and the testing communities are migrating into this new avatar. Initially testing communities struggled a bit to accept the reality and cope up, but now, they are all OK and trying to walk in that direction. There are many frameworks of open source and proprietary evolved and testing communities using them to maximize their efforts. End of the day, delivering the right quality of the application/product is mandate.
Functionality and data are tightly coupled in standalone applications and when planned move them into cloud, they must be decoupled. In this context of cloud migration, micro services also play vital role and hence communities are looking for application modernization too. One side fast execution and agile methodologies, another side maintaining the quality of the deliverables posing great challenges for manual testing and hence test automation is exhibiting decent promise to meet the need.
In this given speed phase of the IT industry, still there are many companies, looking for functional/manual testers. It is because of proven processes/practices and metrics established in manual testing. New digital technologies, delivery models and AI/ML field, disrupting this space big time, testing communities started focusing more on building automation scripts that are faster/easier to build and maintain. As a matter of fact, there is a huge need to create automated, low code/no code and script less scripts.
In NGS, We made it a standard process to take the lessons learnt from manual testing as a input to build and maintain automation suite. Elaborate care is taken to ensure the ease of maintenance through various automation frameworks. In this context there are few learnings from manual testing need to be considered while automating and can’t be ignored. Some of them are:
- Doing the debate on requirements and arriving at the list of most of the possible test scenarios
- Covering scenarios that satisfy minimum of 5 types of test cases (Positive, Negative, Neutral, Equivalence Partitioning, and Boundary Value) for any given requirement
- Handling Adhoc scenarios
- Handshake of Data integration with functionality and its connecting point failures
- Approach of segmenting the test cases in the automaton script (there are many factors to be considered like micro services..etc)
As the world is moving towards digitalization, test automation teams…… gear up and you are going to change the IT delivery!
