What are the prime considerations in Automated Testing

Posted in: Ins & Outs of Automation

What are the prime considerations in Automated Testing?

Automation makes life easier for testers for better reproduction of test results, coverage and reduction in effort. With automation we can produce better and more effective metrics that can help in understanding the state of health of a product in a quantifiable way, thus taking us to the next change.

As a widely accepted industry practice, following considerations are kept in mind while performing testing with automated tools:

1) Clear and reasonable expectations should be established in order to know what can and what cannot be accomplished with automated testing in the organization.

2) There should be clear understanding of the requirements that should be met in order to achieve successful automated testing. This requires that the technical personnel should use the tools effectively.

3) The organization should have detailed, reusable test cases which contain exact expected results and a stand alone test environment with a restorable database.

4) Testing tool should be cost-effective.

The tool must ensure that test cases developed for manual testing are also useful for automated testing.5) Select a tool that allows the implementation of automated testing in a way that conforms to the specified long-term testing strategy.

Automated tools like “Mothora” are used for creating & executing test cases, measuring their adequacy, finding input – output correctness, locating & removing errors or bugs & controlling & doing documentation of the test.

Similarly, “BugTrapper” is used to perform white box testing. This tool traces the path of execution and captures the bug along with the path of execution and the different input values that resulted in the error.

Following few automated Software Testing tools are commonly used:

	Tool Supplier	Testing Tools
1	HP	QuickTest Professional LoadRunner
2	IBM / Rational	Rational Functional Tester Requirements Pro Robot
3	Segue	Silk Test Silk Performer Silk Central
4	Compuware	Reconcile QA Load QA Run

It may be any phase of software development life cycle (SDLC), automated tools are always there.

We use tools like MS Project etc. for project management. Design tools like object modeling technique (OMT), testing tools like flow graph generator are also available in the market.

Regression testing tools, which are generally known as Computer Aided Software Testing Tools (CAST), are finally used during testing life cycle.

A few other tools used in the industry are listed here:

	Testing Tool	Tool Supplier	Type of Application
1	SOA Manager	Rational (IBM)	Test management
2	Review Pro	Software Development Technologies (SDT)	Review management
3	Visual Quality	McCabe and his associates	Cyclomatic complexities of source code
4	Java Scope	Sun Microsystems	Coverage analysis
5	Bounds Checker	Compuware	Memory testing
6	CA-Datamacs/II	Computer Associates	Database generators