by Misha Kalhin, Senior Project Manager
Consumer demand and competition drive businesses to upgrade their software frequently, adding new features, while making sure they support all possible platforms AND keeping it intuitive, easy-to-use and visually impressive. In an effort to meet these requirements systems become more complex, and often product quality issues come up due to insufficient testing. For any business, catching bugs late in the lifecycle means lower customer satisfaction and higher fixing costs.
Manual testing is no longer sufficient in today’s rapidly changing world, it’s too labor-intensive and inefficient. Automated regression testing helps you test your system after every build, to make sure new additions have not broken existing functions.  Perhaps automated testing cannot solve all problems, but today it has to be a part of any testing strategy.
Businesses are often reluctant to implement test automation due to lack of expertise, and fear that it would take a great effort to implement. That’s what makes test automation a great candidate for outsourcing to an experienced vendor. Regression testing team can be completely independent from your Agile team. Read more on that here.
Test Automation Trends
Studies show that test automation pays for itself in the first 6 months, and return over the first 18 months is around 80%. In addition, test automation frees up your manual testers from doing tedious work and focus on more meaningful test case creation that requires more human intuition and knowledge of system business logic.
An experienced vendor will set up a process to select test cases for automation and a team of professionals will maintain and update an automated test suite – responding to the constantly changing software product – Â and regularly execute the regression suite to:
- Increase code coverage
- Improve code quality
Some of the automation tools are proprietary, but there are also several open source tools that will meet all your automation needs while keeping the cost low. In addition, running automated test scripts is a repeatable process that can be reused and executed frequently and quickly pays for itself by reducing manual testing effort, improving product quality and stability.
API Testing
In addition to GUI test automation, which simulates end-user’s interactions with the system, another rising type of test automation in 2014 is API testing (often called headless testing), which tests whether application programming interfaces (APIs) are doing what they are supposed to, without GUI component. Tools such as soapUI, Jasmine, PhantomJS have been used extensively for such headless technologies as API, REST, DB, and JMS.
Cloud testing
Cloud testing can come handy for performance and load testing. If you would like to see how your system performs when it is accessed by hundreds of machines at the same time, it’s much easier to create these instances in the cloud than ask your IT to set them up in-house. Read more about cloud testing here.
Test Automation Services from Dextrys
Dextrys offers easy-to-implement, comprehensive automation testing solutions. With Dextrys’ automated testing solution, all activities of the testing process are included in the scope of automation in order to achieve a high level of system integration, increasing code coverage and improving product quality.
