5 test methods that require automation

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February 2, 2021 Business

It’s hard not to notice the tendency to automation. It’s everywhere starting from engineering ending with marketing automation. The rapid development of Artificial intelligence and Machine Learning technologies results in benefits for all the industries, but the most visible impact is observed in IT, and especially software quality assurance. Its main aim is to optimize the human and time resources by replacing the tests that were previously run manually with the scripts performing the checks making the results faster and more accurate.

Let’s have an overview of what tests need to be automated in the first turn:

Cross-platform testing

If your application needs to be supported by several browsers and platforms, imagine how much time would be necessary to compile the number of supported systems and then after every release repeat the same process for each platform. There’s a risk of missing some important points after going through the same scenario 100 times or even more throughout the full application lifecycle. Cross-platform testing is the first thing to automate in your project, as it allows to deliver the test results faster, thus to act on them faster speeding up the release.

API testing

This testing method is responsible for checking the connection of your system to external applications. In other words, to confirm that the methods and transmitted parameters are working as expected. For instance to verify if a method accepting requests from users declines the incorrect parameters to prevent malicious injections. The variety of tools for API testing will help you to make the process easier. Automating it brings another benefit – the availability to perform testing simultaneously with the development.

Regression testing

After a new feature or functionality is added to the system, it’s necessary to make sure that it does not break anything. Here’s where Regression testing comes in place. It checks all the components that were in place before a change occurred and verifies that their functionality is not affected. It’s one of the most effective tests to automate economically wise, as manual testing of the same code over and over may result in human factor missing some critical bugs due to inattentiveness, and increased testing times, as the functionality of your website or application is growing with time.

Unit testing

Unit testing makes it possible to test a single function or method separately from different components to ensure it performs the correct function. It significantly simplifies troubleshooting when applied along with writing the code. Testing all pieces of code one by one would be a cumbersome process, so here automation helps to optimize this process.

Smoke testing

As it might be guessable by its name, where there is smoke, there is a danger. Smoke tests help to test the quality of a system built before the release. Their main aim is to ensure that a core functionality like the connection to all the libraries, permissions, and configuration settings are not broken. Usually, this type of testing is done on the sandbox and locally because if the test is not passing, the release is postponed.

It’s natural that not everything can be automated, but in reality, you don’t even need to strive at full automation. Manual testing is equally important when you need to perform ad hoc or exploratory test checks that do not fit under any scenario. Also, it may not be efficient from the financial point of view to automate the tests that fall into a category of automation but used once or twice per year. Starting automation with small steps even if you end up automating only the part of the used tests will still help your