How can you speed up software delivery with automated testing?

Automated testing is a process where software tools and scripts perform pre-defined tests on a software application to ensure its quality and functionality. This method speeds up software delivery by quickly identifying bugs and issues, reducing manual testing time, and enabling more frequent and reliable releases. It's an essential practice in modern software development, streamlining the development process and enhancing overall software quality.

Yes Automated testing help find bugs early in the lifecycle of software development. Also it overrides the huge repetition of manual work on the fly.

"Automation testing assures bug-free quality software." This statement is incorrect. Automation testing is just the process of automating repetitive tests to reduce manual effort and allow QA teams to focus on other testing activities, such as exploratory testing. While it enhances speed and efficiency in testing, it does not guarantee a bug-free product. Choosing the right tests to automate is crucial for the long-term success of an automation strategy. Investing in automation can be costly for any company, but the return on investment (ROI) is significant.

Automated testing also includes end to end solution testing to make the software bug free to the customer. After the functional testing being done,the software will be tested with more coverage and areas where the actual bug hides in. This makes up to deliver a quality software by catching up bugs which are missed to get caught in initial testing like unit testing ans functional testing

Automated testing is the practice of using tools and techniques to run tests automatically or by schedule , which usually gives the opportunity to run more tests in some time than you would be able to perform manually. Also, the human error factor in manual testing is diminished when you are doing automated testing, because the computer or tool you are using is doing the checks for you.

There are many benefits to using automated testing, including: Increased speed and efficiency: Automated tests can be executed much faster than manual tests, which can significantly reduce the time it takes to test software. This is especially important for complex software with a large number of tests. Improved accuracy: Automated tests are less prone to human error than manual tests. Increased test coverage: Automated tests can be used to test a wider range of scenarios than manual tests. This is because automated tests can be run unattended, which allows testers to focus on more complex and exploratory testing. Reduced costs: Automating repetitive testing tasks can free up testers to focus on more strategic and value-added activities.

Testing, particularly for acceptance may be unavoidable but I know of no case where it has lead to a guarantee that the product is " bug" free [let alone a proof of this]. catching errors is one thing, demonstrating the complete absence of errors is different.

I think trying to write test scripts helps test engineers to learn problem solving and algorithm designing, because sometimes test engineers have to write test scripts to test complicated software systems. So a test engineer should be a perfect programmer, who can understand the business and it's challenges and can find an efficient way to solve it.

You can test a scenario manually and it will take you x hours. With automation testing, I can write a test script to do the same thing a human can do in the equivalent time. The difference is: If you want to run the test again manually, you dedicate human hours to do it over. Human error is a thing and exists. With automation, I can schedule that same test to run how ever many times I want without dedicating time again. The load in automation is writing it. After writing it, you save cost, time resources from executing it again.

When there is too much coverage or the feature to be tested. It becomes tedious job to have the software tested by manual execution. Instead when we have automated tools and scripts in place, testing software becomes a cakewalk. And in the STLC(software testing life cycle),time bound testing in more important to deliver the software on time. Automated testing not only speeds up the process but helps in for a quality check

Few points to be noted: 1. Pick the right frameworks and tools. 2. Set enough time for automation and testing it out. 3. Keep improving the automation. 4. Run coverage tools along with the automated tests so that the gaps in test cases can be filled in and maximum benefit can be reaped out of the automation setup. 5. Make sure to have a robust framework so that adding or modifying tests is easy. 6. Follow good coding standards to avoid false alarms in automation.

According to my experience, test tools are not sufficient and you should expand them. You can add features to a test tool or sometimes customize existing features of it in order to satisfy your requirements.

First and foremost we need to understand the coverage and the test plan to perform the active software testing.Based on that we can automate certain scripts,regression system,tools and frameworks to define the test case templates and flow. Also as mentioned the cron and schedulers to run the scripts on time will help

If I were to implement automation testing, I would follow below rules: 1. Understand the software product thoroughly. 2. Determine the QA teams comfortable programming language and select the right automation framework/ IDE with chosen programming languages. 3. Create wrapper on above to enhance reusability of automation components and Implement a custom logger for better traceability and add comprehensive report tools. 4. Integrate on CI/CD pipeline to enable continuous testing. 5. Set a rule of good automation scripting guideline to ensure consistency and maintainability and push script to git for team collaboration. 7. Train the team to ensure effective collaboration in maintaining the automation.

Agree with those points to perform Automated testing. below are vital. Nonetheless it is always good idea to improve the existing framework which is trending in the market than to create new one - programming language - Automation tool - framework - Metrics

In UI automation, the most challenging part is reducing flakiness, which occurs due to environmental changes, network issues, or timing dependencies. Managing changes/updates to external third-party services, on which the tests rely, can also be challenging. Dealing with incomplete API documentation has always been a challenge for me. Additionally, not treating automation tests as software development has been challenging when trying to adapt to Agile methodologies.

My biggest challenge is to write tests which are fit to our requirements. We should design setup and teardown functions intelligently. Sometimes we should create test data automatically.

Challenges are always there when it comes to building up a system or an infrastructure. It may be a situation where framework or tools might not be full fledged to catch up the bugs ,or it may be process oriented or the devices under test might not be available instead working on the simulation. All that are challenges in the initial phase but later on how do we improve on these issues and come up with having a reliable automated testing system decides our consistency in testing the code

1. Building automation from the scratch, especially if it’s IoT project. 2. Design test automation framework so that developers can also maintain it. 3. Keep tests up to date.

One of the challenges that I have faced in automation testing is the difficulty in creating automated tests that fit all the business requirements in an ever changing industry where we have deployments daily and releases ever month. The has led to a lot of time being spent in the management of the automated test and fixing/updating the scripts when needed. These challenges truly show the value of reusability and maintainability of the code in testing. We take this into account now when we are writing and updating our tests. Also we are now using Cucumber BDD framework, so our code could easily be understood and reused in the future by any tester.