Best Practices for Automated QA Testing on Websites

QA teams, CTOs, and C-suite executives handle all the pressure when it comes to automating their testing process, believing that automated testing is always faster, more effective, and cheaper.

However, when is the best time to automate? And is it always better to automate? We are here to answer these questions and offer you the best practices for automation testing. Let’s begin!

What is automated testing? 

What does automated testing actually mean? It is a process defined as a testing method that uses specific software to create pre-scripted test cases. Even though manual testing is performed by using a phone or computer to test an application, an automation tool will conduct these test cases during automation testing. This means you can tweak software to run plenty of test cases at once and discover issues that may affect your users.

4 best practices for automated QA testing

When your website doesn’t work properly, most users will likely avoid using it. Manual testing to find defects or bugs is time-consuming, costly, and subject to human error.

Automated testing uses tools to run detailed and data-intensive tests automatically, which helps improve software quality regardless of a team’s limited testing resources. Test automation tools can help businesses test faster, allow you to test more code, improve test accuracy, and let QA engineers work on manual tests.

Below are our tips to ensure successful software testing and maximum return on investment (ROI).

1. Choose the test cases to automate

Even though automated testing is useful, you shouldn’t conduct it for all your testing. Therefore, it’s important to determine the cases that should be automated first.

Automated testing works best for tasks that require high repetition. On the other hand, tests that are only performed a few times are better for manual testing. Good test cases for automation are the ones that must run frequently and need a large amount of data. Here are ways to get the most benefit of your automated testing efforts:

Repetitive tests that run for various builds.

• Tests that may be prone to human error.
• Tests that need multiple data sets.
• Frequently used functionality that brings high-risk conditions.
• Tests that aren’t possible to do manually.
• Tests that can be conducted on multiple hardware or software platforms.

Test automation requires thorough planning and design. You can start by creating an automation plan that identifies the first sets of tests to automate and serves as a guide for future tests. Then, determine your goal and the types of tests to automate. It’s best to divide your tests into several smaller tests instead of large, complex ones, as they are easier to edit and debug.

2. Choose the most suitable automated testing tool

After knowing what tests to automate, the second step is selecting the appropriate tools for your testing needs. With all the available automated testing tools, consider the following before deciding:

• Application technology: Which operating systems are you testing on? Are you testing web applications? Will you also be testing on mobile applications? If so, do you work only with iOS, Android, or both operating systems?
• Tester’s skill set: Automated testing usually involves programming languages like Python, Java, Ruby, or Perl. Determine whether your team has the necessary skills or requires additional training. You may also consider hiring team members with expertise in your chosen tool and scripting language. 
• Open source or commercial tools: Consider budgetary constraints when choosing testing tools. Will open-source tools meet your requirements and provide the proper functionality to their commercial counterparts?
• Include rich but easy-to-create automated tests: Does the automated testing tool support record and playback test creation and manual automated test creation? Also, does it include features for implementing checkpoints to verify values, key functionality and databases of your application? 

3. Divide your automated testing efforts

The creation of various tests usually depends on the QA engineer’s skill level. It’s important to know each team member’s skill level and divide your automated testing efforts accordingly. For example, writing automated test scripts will require expert knowledge of scripting languages. Therefore, to perform these tasks, you must have QA engineers who understand the automated testing tool’s script language.

Team members may need to be qualified to write automated test scripts and may be better at writing test cases. It’s better when an automated testing tool can create automated tests without in-depth knowledge of scripting languages. 

Remember to also collaborate on your automated testing project with other QA engineers. Finding defects is much more effective when the testing is performed by a team with the proper testing tools that let you share your projects with other testers. 

4. Create quality test data 

Good test data is useful for data-driven testing. The data that must be entered into input fields during automated tests is usually stored in an external file. This data may be read from a database or other data source, such as XML files, Excel sheets, and database tables. A good automated testing tool understands the data file’s contents and iterates over them during the automated test. 

External data will make your automated tests reusable and easier to maintain. For other testing scenarios, you can easily extend the files with new data without editing the actual automated test.

Indeed, creating test data for your automated is a boring job, but the time and investment you’ve put in will pay off to create well-structured data. With quality data available, it will be easier to write the automated tests. The earlier you gather and create good-quality data, the easier it will be to extend existing automated tests and the application’s development.

Conclusion

Automated testing is an excellent solution that improves overall QA testing. When executed properly, it can help you save time and costs. However, many test cases still require human intervention, and many testing types, like exploratory testing, aren’t possible with automation. 

Remember that you shouldn’t rely 100% on automated tests, as this is a surefire way to miss the bugs you should’ve caught during manual testing. Whether your testing relies on speed or quality, a mix of manual and automated testing will create your desired results—a better-quality application.