Software Test Automation: Harnessing the Power of Software Test Automation
Software test automation denotes the testing of a software product using a set of automated tools. It is basically an automated way of testing software products using another software. Computers have taken over a lot of the repetitive and ‘boring’ tasks that a human would normally hate to do. Software testing is one such area where manual testing methods and processes would soon make a human bored. A human being would be prone to make mistakes when the tests are conducted several times while trying to perfect the product.
During the early days when software products were tested for performance and accuracy, the whole testing would be done by the coder himself. This was however risky, as it was found out, because the coder had an emotional attachment to his codes and also because he had a tendency to overlook areas which were problematic. Someone who is not part of the development team was found to be a better choice.
Software testing using automation avoids all of the errors that a human would normally do. It would not tire out and it would come out with the reports of the testing much faster with a lot better accuracy. This comprehensive report can be fed into a reporting system thereby letting the QA team know what the status of development of the product is.
Another significant advantage of the automated testing is that it is much more intensive and covers a wider area, compared to a manual testing scenario where the tests cases are checked manually.
All software development processes can be tracked using a Product Life Cycle. A product life cycle is a concept that essentially divides the development of a product into six major stages. In each stage, automation can help reduce errors by an extensive testing procedure.
The first stage is the design phase where the user interface of the product are discussed and designed. In this stage though, development is in a nascent phase and there is no opportunity to use the automation methodology to test. Instead, QA develops a manual testing scenario which is more effective.
The code completion phase is the next stage where the actual development of new code ends. The importance of this stage is that from now on all energy will be devoted to debugging of the developed code. This is where the QA people start writing test case scenarios for automation testing. However, in order not to stress out the product, as it is still unstable, only overall completion testing is done.
The alpha stage is where automation checks the interoperability, performance and the integrity of the code. The test cases are much deeper than in code completion stage.
Beta stage will also see a lot of interoperability and other tests done as the major test cases and scenarios are expected to be already completed at the alpha stage.
The Zero defect stage and the Green master stage require a lot of regression testing to ensure that the bugs which were discovered during the first four stages and were fixed earlier are still remaining fixed.