What is Automated QA Testing & Why It has become Extremely Essential in 2023?

Introduction:

The market for software development is very cutthroat. Organizations must not only guarantee the quality of the final product, but they must also act quickly to meet consumer demands. While QA Testing ensures the first requirement, QA Software Testing ensures the second requirement by automating the testing process.

Therefore, QA Automation Testing is your savior when you are under pressure to thoroughly test every piece of software before the final product is released into the market or when you need to release updates to your product faster than ever.

What is Automated QA Testing?

Before we know about QA testing, we first need to understand SLDC. Development teams employ the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) process to plan, design, create, and test high-quality software. It stresses the organization of tasks carried out across a system or application project's complete life cycle, which includes the stages of planning, analysis, design, implementation, testing, deployment, and maintenance.

To make sure that all project requirements are satisfied, the SDLC specifies how each process phase will be carried out. It also supports the development process by offering structure and direction so that teams may concentrate on creating a quality product within financial and time limitations.

The use of software tools to automate the laborious, human-driven process of evaluating and validating software is known as automated testing. Nowadays, the majority of agile and DevOps software projects start with automated testing. However, it is useful to comprehend the state of affairs before the widespread adoption of automated testing to fully understand its value. Not all kinds of tests in SLDC are automated but these are the ones that are commonly included in an automated cycle: 

1. Unit tests:

As the name suggests, test individual pieces of code. The best way to measure units of code is via function definitions. An individual function will be tested in a unit test. Unit tests will claim that a function's expected input and output match. Unit tests are the greatest way to cover code that contains delicate calculations (as it may relate to banking, healthcare, or aerospace). Unit tests have a high return on investment and are rapid and inexpensive to implement.

2. End-to-end tests

They are surely the ones that are most worthwhile to implement with automation. E2E tests replicate the user experience throughout the whole software stack. Plans for E2E tests typically include stories at the user level, such as "a user can log in," "a user can make a deposit," and "a user can change email settings." Implementing these tests is very beneficial because it ensures that real users are getting a bug-free experience even after new commits are pushed.

3. Integrity checks

An external call to a service provided by a third party is frequently made by a unit of code. The code of this third-party utility won't be accessible to the main codebase being tested. Integration tests verify that the code interacting with these third-party dependencies operates as expected by mimicking them. 

In terms of writing style and tooling, integration tests resemble unit tests. Although integration tests can be a less expensive alternative to E2E tests, their ROI is questionable when unit tests and E2E are already present.

4. Performance Testing:

Performance' refers to how quickly and responsively a software project responds when employed in the context of software development. The 'time to page load', 'time to first render', and search results response time' are a few examples of performance indicators. 

For these example cases, performance tests produce measurements and assertions. Test cases will be executed against these metrics using automated performance tests, which will subsequently notify the team of any speed or regression regressions.

Benefits of Automated QA Testing:

1. Cost savings: Compared to manual testing, automated testing can save time and money because it requires fewer manual testers and produces results more quickly.

2. Increased test coverage: Compared to manual testing, automated testing may cover a substantially higher number of test cases, enabling the product to be tested in more detail. Test execution is substantially quicker with automated testing than with human testing, enabling more frequent testing and quicker discovery of flaws.

3. Consistency: Because automated testing uses the same test methods repeatedly, it is more reliable than manual testing and lowers the possibility of human error.

4. Improved accuracy: Because automated testing tools can do complex calculations and comparisons more quickly and simply than manual testing methods, they can produce results that are more accurate than manual methods.

Wrapping Up:

Automated QA testing is now part of the industry and a growing number of organizations are making it compulsory in their development routines. If you are looking for a world-class third-party solution to improve your testing routines on a budget that is not heavy on your finance department, then we recommend selecting Test Automation Services from WeTest. Your software project will get integration with the most popular CI/CD tools to trigger automated tests, parallel executions and much more in the hands of professional IT teams.