Introduction to tests automation

In today’s software development life cycle, testing is a very important phase as its time taking and monotonous test automation has a emerged as wonderful solution and become very popular for both Client Server and Web environments.

As the Scope and requirements for testing is increasing day by day and time for testing is getting smaller and smaller every day the top management are realizing a greater need for test automation or automated tests.

Definition

"Automated tests execute a sequence of actions without human intervention".

This approach helps eliminate human error, and provides faster results. Since most products require tests to be run many times, automated testing generally leads to significant labor cost savings over time. Typically a company will pass the break-even point for labor costs after just two or three runs of an automated test.


Overview

Application testing is a critical part of all software development projects today . As more organizations develop mission-critical systems to support their clients and business activities, the need is greatly increased for testing methods that support business objectives. It is necessary to ensure that these systems are reliable, built according to specification, and have the ability to support business processes.

Many factors are forcing organizations to ensure a high level of software quality and reliability. Some of the most commonly cited reasons requiring organizations to adopt software quality initiatives include the increasing quality standards of application end-users, regulated quality requirements, out-of-control maintenance costs, and missed deployment schedules.

Application managers and developers increasingly use testing to support the goals of their organization and ensure an application performs as designed.

The benefits of test automation
1. The possibility to conduct regression tests on a new version of software, particularly in an environment where programs are changed rather frequently.
2. The possibility to carry out several tests and to carry them out a greater number of times is clearly one of the benefits of automation.
3. The possibility of running tests that are impossible to carry out manually
4. A better use of human resources. Automate the repetitive activities such as the repeated use of the same input data, leaving the testers more time to plan better test cases or to more thoroughly carry out test cases that are better done manually.
5. Hardware resources can be managed more carefully by planning the running of the test when the hardware resources are not active (at night, on holidays...)


(To be continued......)