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Web Automation Guide: Examples & Best Practices

AmritaAngappa01 — Mon, 22 Jan 2024 18:49:18 +0000

OVERVIEW

Web automation refers to using test scripts to perform tasks on the web automatically. It includes tasks like filling out forms, navigating web pages, clicking links or buttons, and extracting data from websites.

It can be useful for various purposes, such as automating data entry or testing the functionality of a website. There are several tools and programming languages that can be used to automate tasks on the web, including Selenium, Cypress, Playwright, etc.

Since there are umpteen browsers, such as Firefox and Chrome. Most users believe web browsers are meant to fetch the needed information and surf different web pages. It’s far more than that when we involve web app development. To ensure that your app is performing excellently, it’s better to perform automated cross browser testing, an ideal way of testing your website on different browsers, OS, and devices.

What is web automation?

Web automation is the ability to programmatically control a website through its web interface using scripts and tools. This allows organizations to save time and reduce costs by automating processes normally done manually. An often-cited example is how an organization can use tools to test its site rather than having multiple testers constantly doing so. With web automation, you can stay assured to bid farewell to repetitive and humongous human-centric tasks.

We currently live in a world where web apps and websites dominate the internet. That paves the urge for web testing. Do you know that nearly 77% of testers have gotten their hands dirty on web testing?

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Why automate web testing?

Web automation is the best way to achieve the desired results faster. Automation testing has been making a huge noise in the market. This software testing process can let you automate the test execution process with the right set of automation testing tools and techniques. We perform it to check if the software application has the grit to perform exactly how we want it to perform.

Get feedback faster than ever: Automation testing is the most significant part of validation in different development phases. Your teams can get an idea of potential bugs. When you automate web app or website testing, it would consume less time and make communication simplified among your team, comprising testers, developers, and designers.
Spruce up test efficiency: Setting up the test automation framework is initially time-consuming when you automate web testing. The test coverage rates are wider, considering that when you validate every test, you also validate a number of functions and features. Since automation would move faster, the entire test suite can take surprisingly less time for execution. Once you initiate automation tests, testers can look at the tasks and evaluate the results once they execute the test cases.
Bring down the expenses: Web automation testing can play a huge role in achieving the right test coverage in a shorter time span. This is the reason for the high-end quality of the product. Thus the probability of bugs can be consistently post-release. This can save your project cost.
Reuse test cases when you automate web testing: The role of web automation is to ensure that it makes repetitive test scripts reusable. This is useful when developing new patches and testing the software once again.
Track the time to market: Web automation can be responsible for boosting test coverage in a shorter span of time. This can help QA during code review for any newly developed feature whenever there is a tight deadline. All this can help you make that remarkable website or web app online.
Enhanced visibility: Web automation can make your business achieve visible results since a bot can record every step in the workflow. You can also keep track of different steps in the form of audit trails. Every company can access all these logs and get better insights into the involved process.
Reduce human errors: Since we expect a bot to follow rule-oriented tasks with no human intervention, we can guarantee that our expectations are met. They wouldn’t make many errors or miss any steps existing in the workflow.
Reduce your overall turnaround time: With web automation, you can improve how you test new websites and applications. Since every bot can run different test cases on different browsers 24/7, you can save the turnaround time for rolling out the application faster.
IT skill development: When you automate web apps or website tests, you needn’t worry about time consumption much since you can save a lot of time and use it for skill development.

Despite many benefits, the major limitation of web automation testing is that the initial cost could be a bit higher than manual testing. Also, it’s suggested to manually perform tests involving 100% human creativity, even if you find tools online, though there is no harm in taking them as a part of guidance.

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How web automation fits into different testing types?

It can be a whole new challenge when you want to test your website or web app manually. It’s extremely taxing when a tester has to perform many tests under strict deadlines. This can make you think about how important automation can be for a day-to-day task.

Every manual tester should consider the benefits of test automation compared to manual testing. It’s time to move forward. Let’s make your life easier with this four-step process:

Step 1: Find the right test cases to automate web testing.

You need to understand which test cases you can automate. But you also must remember that you cannot automate web testing for every test case. Hence you need to dissect which test case you should automate and which you needn’t. Here are the most commonly automated test cases:

Step 2: Find compatible tools or frameworks

There are numerous libraries or frameworks, but not everyone is popular among the masses. The tool selection process is crucial in the long run. Ensure that you have the right answers to these questions:

Are there all those features that you desire with support towards native integration?.
Can developers and manual/automated QAs adapt to the testing requirements?
What’s the size and scope of the project?
Which platform does your application use?
Can you easily maintain test scripts and reuse all those test assets?
Is it budget-friendly?

Step 3: Check the quality of the automation tool

This is a critical step for everyone developing their testing tool right from an open-source library or framework. There is a vision you need to uphold when you commit to the objective of the tools. The automation tool you use to automate web testing should adhere to your business values. It should be user-friendly with the most needed features and specifications. You should also remember the process and timeline of test execution and scripting.

Step 4: Determine what’s best for your test cases.

To manage test generation, execution, reporting, and maintenance, you can keep a note of the process with a hawk’s eye through proper planning and strategy. You can understand what you need to execute your test at different stages successfully. Here is an example:

Once you determine your expectations on how you would automate web testing, you need to check how effective the tool can be. You can look into a few metrics to automate web apps and website testing, such as;

Execution time reduction.
Time taken to rewrite/update tests.
Increase in execution time for a specific test.
Reduction in development time.

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How do you automate web testing?

Web automation, in general, is the process where you record the steps needed to complete a set of tasks. Web browser automation testing offers support in two ways:

During quality management and quality assurance (QA) when you develop the application to ensure basic level functionality.
In performance testing during implementation for support customer service. You need to run all these tests frequently when there are any changes in the configuration.

It’s a common misconception that as you automate web testing, it is a hindrance to creativity. Automation eases the planning process and improves creativity to the next level. You must be clear on which test cases you need to automate. Testing them with top-quality data can demand some effort. This is what is known as test automation framework development. It encompasses a set of guidelines to manage your testing and provide the best results

When you automate web testing, it can help you test early and frequently, even after the product is right in front of the public. When you perform QA testing at an early stage, you are at the maximum possibility of identifying problems before they come across in the design format, which can pave the way for a dull user experience.

The primary purpose of automating web app or website testing is to reduce negative factors. Plenty of tests provide abundant data, but they might not be an expert in detecting defects. This may look productive, but the real problem is never covered.

When you add different scenarios and possible actions, there is a huge scope of error. This is also where creative mistakes might occur. For expanding your creative ability, automation can help.

Divide Your Automated Testing Efforts

When you create different tests, their success mainly relies on QA engineers’ skillset. Knowing your team’s strengths is important when creating the best-automated tests. A few of the team members can be experts at writing automated test scripts. A few would excel when they write test cases. To write automated test scripts, you would need expert-level skills to work in different scripting languages. Hence, if you want to opt for this task, ensure that your QA team is well versed with the automation testing tool’s scripting language.

Create Good Quality Test Data

It’s mandatory to provide better test data to ensure data-driven testing. The typical practice is to store the data entered into different input fields in an external file. When you use these external data, it makes automated tests quite reusable and simple. The automated testing tool would also understand the data file content. It would iterate over the content present in the automated tests. It might seem to be a daunting task to create test data for automated tests. But, it’s one of the most effective practices in the market.

Create UI-Resistant Automated Tests

When you create automated tests with scripts, you are subscribing to the dependency on the application under the test’s user interface. All these changes would impact the test results, or else the automated tests wouldn’t work on the application’s future versions. Ensure that you provide unique names for controlling different processes. This would help you stay a step ahead of the impact made by the automated test changes.

Leverage Pugh Matrix

The Pugh Matrix is a well-known criteria-based decision matrix leveraging criteria scoring for determining which alternatives or solutions you need to select. Many analysts make the best of it to rate the selection criteria’s weightage. For example, you can rate the number of features you deem as the most desirable as follows:

Extremely preferable: 10
Highly preferable: 8
Preferable to have: 5

This would provide you with a clearance on what you need to expect in your web automation tool, and whatnot.

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Best practices for web automation testing

Web automation can be done to perfection if you involve the right plan, strategy, and tools. Here are a few tips to make the best out of web automation:

Ensure that you perform risk analysis for affectability, mitigation, potential costs, probability, and so on
The early bird wins the trophy. Start planning your web automation testing process. Ensure resource allocation at the earliest. Don’t overrun costs and schedules
Review all the test artifacts. Ensure alignment of test planning with test functionality. The test planning should be quite dynamic and well-planned
You cannot automate every test case. Test cases needing automation should have clear criteria for pass/fail results. Also, it’s worth automating tests that consume time, are highly prone to failure, and consist of stable features. You can preferably manually conduct UX, anti-automation, and such tests with mandatory human intervention.
You needn’t choose the “best” automation tool in the market. Instead, look at the scope of your project and pick the one meeting your goals.
For consistency purposes, the stage environment should be twinning with the development and test environment. On the other hand, the stage environment should be proportionate to the production environment.
Start with free trials. Take the liberty of free consultations to learn more about web automation tools and their features. This can ensure a smoother transition between testing teams
Before you write test cases, define the best web automation practices for the particular project.
Always adopt Behavior-Driven Development to ensure stakeholders and testers are in sync.
Before adding any test into a regression suite, run and verify them as often as needed.
For code reusability, data-drive your test. Through this approach, you can generate different test cases through changes in the data you store in external storage.
You can use a test scheduler or a pipeline orchestrator to execute parallel test cases.
Check how your website or web app performs under different network conditions
Identify tests that are slow and fail often.
Compare your test results against previous or similar tests.
Automated test reports are always a boon for testers. You can analyze the results and make the best decisions.

Real-time application of web automation testing

Web automation can come in handy when developing websites or web apps. At LambdaTest, we have catered to many clients belonging to different domains.

One of the most popular education platforms, Edureka, relies directly on LambdaTest to provide their client with a top-notch learning experience via robust UI with cross browser compatibility & mobile-friendly applications. Their main aim when they approached us was to provide their users with a seamless e-learning experience.

Without going through the pathway of in-house infrastructure, Edureka chose cloud-based solutions. With the support of LambdaTest, they can now provide their users with a wholesome pathway to learn and grow

“Delivering a website that behaves consistently across all browsers, operating systems & mobile viewports seemed like a daunting task. Kudos to LambdaTest! We’re able to do so far more easily than we imagined.” — says Lovleen

Before they chose LambdaTest, the team constantly struggled with lesser browser coverage. They preferred to have a cloud-compatible Selenium Grid with various frameworks and programming languages. With the support of LambdaTest, the team could execute nearly 200 tests via parallel testing. Test suites taking an hour now take only around 5 minutes. This helped Edureka to release their build faster to update their users with the best online content.

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Choosing Cloud testing platforms like LambdaTest can offer you an online browser farm of 3000+ browsers & operating systems for performing cross browser testing at scale.

Similarly, a state Government agency delivered a quality experience to many website visitors from different locations across the globe. The agency is now able to achieve 100% browser coverage. The entire test execution time has now been reduced up to 66%.

This became possible through our online Selenium Grid. These are their favorite features:

Parallel testing for speeding up release cycles
Custom tagging to group their tests with JIRA integration
Video recording feature for different test execution to capture more bugs that are non-reproducible
Upload different files and perform PDF testing
Reduce the total build execution time by 70% via parallel testing
Video recording feature for different test execution to capture more bugs that are non-reproducible

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How is web automation different from artificial intelligence?

The terms automation and artificial intelligence (AI) are aimed at making your life easier, but they aren’t the same. While AI is the science where you create machines to solve different problems and accomplish various tasks difficult for the human brain to comprehend, automation aims at automating different processes with less-to-no human intervention. Automation helps you perform those tasks deemed difficult or impossible in a shorter time. On the other hand, AI simulates human intelligence.

The idea behind AI is to help machines and computers behave like humans and learn directly from them, whereas automation simplifies tasks, increases productivity, and provides efficient output.

That’s why website automation is important for every organization to save time, minimize human errors, stay competitive and calm your mind.

Automating different types of web applications

When you choose the best approach to implement web automation for your business, you need to be aware of the approaches you need to leverage for different types of websites and web apps

The websites and web apps are classified into these six types: Simple static websites, Dynamic web apps, E-commerce websites, Mobile websites, Animated web applications, and Rich Internet web applications. You can automate web app and website testing easily.

Simple Static Website testing

A simple static website would display the content on a single page provided by your team with no alterations to visitors. The website performance dependencies are entirely upon various UI functionalities.

Hence, for testing a static website, checking every GUI element, including font size, spacing, style, and color, is a must. Checking for broken links, image displays, and contact forms is also necessary. You can check these with the best UI testing tools when you automate web testing.

Dynamic web app or CMS website testing

With a dynamic web application, the content mill is churning every day, week, or month. It translates to frequent updates. It also includes backend programming languages, say Angular, PHP, JavaScript, and Python, and frontend programming, such as HTML and CSS, or any content management system (CMS) such as Magento, Wix, and WordPress

Check for error messages, text input, and how the button responds. Since dynamic websites can cover various single-page apps, keeping track of session storage is important.

It’s also a must to check how your website performs under different geographical conditions since geolocation testing can contribute a lot to SEO factors. It’s possible through automation testing tools such as LambdaTest.

E-commerce website testing

E-commerce websites combine different pages and features. Hence a tester should ensure that the product they have listed in the e-commerce app is directed to the desired category. Again, a tester should be wary of testing different eCommerce-specific features such as coupons, discounts, login/logout, and payment mode. Our blog on eCommerce website testing can spread more light on this topic.

Mobile website testing

For mobile website testing, every tester should ensure that they perform cross browser, OS, and device compatibility tests. The most preferred way to test the website on a real device cloud will be to check if the website responds exactly as you need. Hence you need to look for text truncation and spatial navigation. chatbot, image display, and so on. Using a real device cloud to manage native app testing can help you go a long way in attracting your users.

Animated web applications testing

An animated web app or website can help you create every animation you need with browser capability. When you automate web animations, Inspecting and manipulating these animations using declarative means like CSS for Animations is also preferable. Conducting unit tests and integration tests can help you sort out the bugs. When you need to animate the UI elements, you can use JavaScript libraries like Flash or JQuery. You can also easily create this prototype with Powerpoint for sharing user feedback.

To check all the responsiveness factors related to shapes, backgrounds, icons, text, and buttons, you can use a responsive testing tool such as LT Browser. This tool allows you to easily check if your website or web app is as responsive as your user would expect.

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How to choose the right web automation tools?

Choosing the right web automation tools isn’t a challenge by itself. It boils down to four important processes:

Step 1: Estimating the size of the project and budget.

Step 2: Identifying the tools and requirements per the project size and budget.

Step 3: Evaluating the quality of the tools and requirements.

Step 4: Discuss with your team the final decision.

Each step plays a crucial role in determining the success of your testing phase. Hence you need to consult the right team members and ensure that you are making the most out of your efforts.

What are the benefits of web automation testing on cloud?

Web automation can benefit businesses in more than one way to ease testing. Here are some of the top benefits of web automation.

Use Real devices and browsers

Emulators and simulators come with their own set of limitations. Mimicking a real-time environment with respect to gestures, sensors, and so on is extremely difficult. That’s where real devices and browsers come into play. You can make the most out of mobile app testing or websites with real devices and browsers. Here is a detailed comparison between a physical device and a real device cloud:

Leverage Selenium Grid

Do you know? An online Selenium Grid like LambdaTest can let you test on more than 3000+ real mobile browsers and desktop devices. Selenium Grid can help your team write better Selenium test scripts instead of pondering over infrastructure maintenance. A cloud Selenium Grid is all you need to trigger the Selenium test scripts at any instant. It’s also affordable and quite manageable for your team.

Run Parallel tests

How about running 100+ tests concurrently to hasten up the test suite’s execution time by 10x? That’s what parallel testing can help you with.

Integrate seamlessly

Integration can happen within a few minutes. For example, when you want to integrate Slack with the LambdaTest platform, it would hardly take a few minutes where you can use your login credentials to connect both platforms and stay in touch with your project management team anytime, anywhere.

Test on developer environment

When you want to test your websites behind the firewall or those you host in development environments with no configuration or setup, you can opt for a dev environment. It’s made easier with a web automation platform.

Extensive debugging features

Debugging can be done seamlessly when you use automated screenshots, network logs, console logs, and video recordings through an automation testing platform.

Better Security & Privacy features

Running your tests on a web or mobile test automation platform can benefit your security expectations since the data would get erased every time you end the session.

How can LambdaTest help you out with web automation?

When planning web automation testing, it’s essential to pick the right tool at the right time. Choosing from a huge range of tools can be tougher, be it Selenium, Playwright, Cypress, Puppeteer, Appium, XCUITest, Taiko, Espresso, etc. That’s where LambdaTest comes into action. Through LambdaTest, you can simplify the onboarding process better than ever. This cloud-based cross browser testing platform can hasten the release speed through high-level cloud-based test automation features. Get the support of a wide arena of frameworks and tools to manage app test automation and web testing.

It’s easier than ever to run your test scripts on the test execution platform. All the features can very well impact the test execution time. Our issue tracker can help you sort the issues on time and fix them.

Here are the steps you can take to test automation as a part of the LambdaTest platform.

Step 1: Visit the LambdaTest platform. You can easily automation testing sign up for free with a few clicks.

Step 2: Select the Automation option from the right sidebar. Choose the desired framework.

Step 3: It’s time to configure the desired settings as instructed.

Step 4: After running the automation tests, you can select Automation > Builds to get the right insights on the automation test when you automate web testing, be it build sessions, passed tests, errors, timeout, failed tests, and more.

With our flexible and rich functionalities, you can always set the right tone for your business.

Conclusion

Web automation testing can make the life of testers a cakewalk. All you need to do is depend upon the best web automation tools to build the best website or web app. This decision would lead you to thank yourself later! Choosing a low-code or codeless automation tool to automate web apps and websites is a decision you can take confidently.

Happy testing!

What Is User Acceptance Testing (UAT): With Best Practices

AmritaAngappa01 — Mon, 22 Jan 2024 16:40:32 +0000

OVERVIEW

User Acceptance Testing (UAT) is the final validation in software development, where end-users ensure the application meets needs and works correctly in real scenarios. UAT aims to ensure that the software application meets the end-user or customer’s expectations and is fit for its intended purpose.

Everybody is aware of the concept of testing, whereas approval refers to agreeing to certain criteria. The user can be a software product consumer or someone who has asked you to build the product for them. The primary purpose of user acceptance testing is to validate it against any business needs and requirements. The end-user with business familiarity would carry out the validation.

What is User Acceptance Testing?

User acceptance testing is also known as end-user testing, where the client or user would perform website testing or mobile app testing. User Acceptance Testing (UAT) is the final phase in software development, where end-users test to ensure the application meets real-world business requirements and performance expectations.

The development and core testing team usually wouldn’t be directly involved in the testing process. It’s to test how welcoming the users are towards the product. This is the final stage of testing you perform after completing the system, functional, and regression testing.

Since user acceptance testing is the last stage of testing that you carry out before making the software live, this is when a customer can perform software testing while measuring how it fits the purpose. This would be a litmus test for the entire software testing life cycle (STLC) of the product.

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The purpose behind User Acceptance Testing

Usually, user acceptance testing is the last step before making the product live or accepting the product’s delivery. We perform it after testing the product thoroughly through system testing.

Developers and testers are none other than tech folks validating the software against different functional specifications. They would interpret the software requirements as per their understanding and domain expertise.

Even though the software is wholesome as per the functional specifications, we must also remember a few business processes and requirements. Only the end-users would be able to interpret them.

Many businesses have suffered huge losses owing to post-release-related issues. It’s harder and cost-nagging to fix the defects after product release than to fix them before. User Acceptance Testing supported by cloud testing can help you sort it out.

Who needs User Acceptance Testing?

Usually, it’s the client or the user performing User Acceptance Testing. The person could be someone who buys the product or someone with custom-built software through the end-user or the service provider. The team can consist of beta testers, or the customer would be requested to choose UAT members on an internal basis from every organizational group to test every user role correctly.

Types of User Acceptance Testing

More than understanding how different user acceptance testing and functional testing are, we need to possess a clear idea of the different types of UAT. These are the user acceptance testing types:

Alpha testing

The QA team would run alpha tests without prospective users. It would take place in the development environment, which is under the project team’s control. If there is any system defect by the testing team during alpha testing, the development team’s job is to fix those bugs before moving the product to the next level of UAT.

Beta testing

Beta testing is also known as field testing, and it’s pretty different when you compare it with alpha testing. This type of UAT would support the customer environment by matching the real-time system usage conditions. For successful beta tests, the project team would engage their prospective customers and let them pinpoint bugs and share product performance and usability opinions.

Operational acceptance testing

This kind of user acceptance testing would hold cases for validating user workflows. Otherwise known as production acceptance testing, you can define operational acceptance testing as one among the UAT types to perform test verification , validate backup plans, user training algorithms, security check completion, and software maintenance.

Prototype testing

Every QA team would run different prototypes at early development stages after designing the MVP fully, thus easily detecting defects and errors before creating the product version. This way, the development and design team can work on the solution again to improve the final functionality and interface.

Every prototype tester would gather their prospective users as a part of the focus groups to validate the interface clarity while corresponding it to user needs and requirements. They use the behavioral data and verbal feedback to get the right idea on which direction the marketing and branding team should choose to upscale the positional and visual aspects.

Contract and regulation acceptance testing

This would imply product validation against the specific requirements in your contract. The job of the testing team would be to review and provide feedback on the acceptance criteria you define in your service level agreement. The experts should ensure that the software complies with data protection, government security, compliances, and regulations.

Factory acceptance testing

We use this kind of UAT within the testing team before beta testing. This goes a long way along the development cycle for validating the software and hardware system components. FAT lets you decide why system defects have occurred. It’s pretty cheaper when you compare it with tests requiring end users.

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Do you really need UAT?

Yes, we do. After you perform integration, regression, and system testing, you might wonder why you need this testing. This is one of the most needed project phases during which the users would validate if the system would fit their needs.

UAT would depend more upon how the end-user would perceive it, the domain strength, and knowledge of the needed department.

This will help your business teams since they can easily provide their opinions and views, letting you use the system in a real-world atmosphere.

Benefits of User Acceptance Testing

As we’ve seen in the previous section, user acceptance testing is a crucial part of Quality Assurance, but what exactly does it entail?

The concept of user acceptance testing came about to improve upon and replace the end-to-end testing method. The major problem with the end-to-end testing method was that the users weren’t testing the application — they were just observing how the product worked on their screen in a controlled environment. Not only did this not provide true usability feedback, but it wasn’t a realistic way to test.

The benefits of user acceptance testing include:

Better end-user experience and higher satisfaction with the final product.
More efficient customer workflows.
Reduced support costs and fewer customer service tickets.
Fewer defects found in production, leading to less downtime, better reliability, and higher productivity.

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Who is responsible for UAT?

Testing or User Acceptance Testing is a critical step in the Software Development Life Cycle that ensures software is ready for release. Traditionally, the QA team was responsible for UAT. However, many companies have moved away from this model and now involve others in UAT.

This could mean anyone from an individual contributor to a CEO. It could also include people who have not been directly involved in project planning and development, as long as they communicate with those who were. For example, if you’re launching a print magazine, you’d want your writers and editors to be aware of how the finished product looks at this stage so they can give their input on what might work better or be more unclear when it comes time to print.

User Acceptance Testing is a critical part of any software development process. It is a time in which users, such as the business owners or end users of the application, test the functionality and usability of the application before it is rolled out to its target audience.

UAT can be done at multiple stages of the software creation lifecycle:

Extreme Programming methodologies suggest that UAT should be performed as often as possible
While this may be expensive and time-consuming, it does ensure that bugs are caught and fixed at an early stage in the development process
More traditional processes have UAT being performed by the end users after testing and acceptance by QA experts

UAT is a critical step in creating a successful application because it ensures that the final product will meet or exceed all expectations of its target audience. You can ensure that your UAT process goes smoothly in multiple ways.

Make sure your users are well versed in how to use your application before they begin testing it.
Stay involved with your users throughout their testing process to ensure that you catch any errors or problems that may arise during their testing phase.
The UAT process is where the rubber meets the road when it comes to meeting organizational goals and objectives.

Prerequisites of User Acceptance Testing

The best way to understand the user acceptance testing process is to start understanding the pre-requisites. These are the following requirements:

The first step is to understand the key acceptance criteria.

To put it in simple words, we use acceptance criteria to evaluate the product before finally accepting it. It can either be business or app functionality oriented. You need to set up a meeting with the user or the client to get a clear idea of how much you need to test along with the aspects. You also need to draw up the initial contract before beginning the review and agreement of the SDLC.

The second step is to define the QA scope.

The scope of a QA is to assist in the testing process. In a few cases, the tester is responsible for recording and responding to the log bugs and results while performing actual tests.

After completing this, you can also present the result to the users/clients. This decision would be on whether all these results would remain sufficient along with the expectations for accepting AUT.

Usually, UAT is the move made by a business user or a Subject Matter Expert (SME).

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User Acceptance Testing Tools

User acceptance testing is a crucial part of a software or web development and design. It refers to the final testing stage before a project goes live, where the client gets to test the product before it’s ready for public use. Several tools can be used for UAT. Which one you use depends on your setup, the scale of your project, what you’re looking for, and how much money you have to spend.

Some top user acceptance testing tools include:

Fitness Tool: Fitness Tool is a Java test engine that helps you create tests and record their results in a table. It is remarkably easy to use, even for those who are not developers.
Waitr: Watir is the most widely used toolkit to automate tests of web applications. It is a ruby testing library for browser-based tests during an acceptance process of Software as a Service.

How to perform User Acceptance Testing?

You can perform User Acceptance Testing in a few simple steps. We perform this software testing type at the location of the client. Once you satisfy the entry criteria, you must complete the following tasks:

Business requirement analysis

The user acceptance testing would require developing and identifying testing scenarios. You can derive the test scenarios from business use cases, project charters, business requirements documents, process flow diagrams, and system requirements specifications (SRS).

UAT test plan creation

The UAT test plan is available to outline the needed strategy for verifying and ensuring that an application meets the needed business requirements. This would document every entry and exit criteria, test cases approach, test scenario, and test timeline.

Test scenario identification

You need to identify the test scenarios regarding high-end business processes while creating test cases with the proper test steps. Your test case should be enough to cover most user acceptance testing scenarios. We consider business use cases as an input to create all the test cases, which would lead you to create an effective test design.

Creation of UAT test cases

You should always be able to leverage live data meant for user acceptance testing. You need to scramble the data for both privacy and security purposes. Every tester should familiarize themselves with the flow of the database.

Test data preparation

Execute different test cases to report any existing bugs. You need to re-test those bugs after you fix them. You can use test management tools to execute it.

Running the test cases

User acceptance testing team or business analysts should send a sign-off mail after you perform user acceptance testing. Once you sign off, you can send the product for production. User acceptance testing deliverables include user acceptance testing scenarios, test plans, test cases, defect logs, and test results.

Results recording

Before you move from the test environment into the production phase, you need to record the results. You need to check for any open critical defects, check on how satisfactory the business process functions, and record the discussion on what the stakeholders have to say.

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How can LambdaTest help you with User Acceptance Testing?

The agile environment, in one or the other way, is quite dynamic. While dealing with an agile world, every business user would involve themselves through every project sprint. They can also enhance the project through different feedback loops.

With LambdaTest, you can get the most out of user acceptance testing. You can efficiently perform beta testing for your app or website using a real device cloud.

Here is the simple procedure you must follow:

Step 1: Sign up and login into the LambdaTest account.

Step 2: Choose Real Device from the left panel to access Real Time and App Automation . Select Real Time.

Step 3:You can find two options in Real Time — App Testing and Browser Testing.

Real Device App Testing

To perform App Testing, you must make sure that you upload your choice of app and configure the needed aspects such as Device and OS type. You can then start the test.

Step 4: Test the app once you install it.

Real Device Browser Testing

Please follow Steps 1–4.

Step 5: Select Browser Testing and type the URL for starting the session. Now, click START after you provide the DEVICE TYPE, DEVICE/OS, and BROWSER.

Step 6:Now, you can test the app once you type the website’s name for testing in the cloud-supported real device on the LambdaTest app.

Challenges in User Acceptance Testing

Conducting user acceptance testing comes with its challenges. It could be a lack of resources or communication. You need to address these bottlenecks.

Hand over UAT to functional testers if you lack resources

Owing to the lack of the right resources, many businesses assign user acceptance testing for their functional testing team. While many functional testers would check how the product would function, the business analysts can take over the end user needs and requirements for verifying the product. All in all, allocating user acceptance testing to a professional team is essential.

Lack of communication

It’s a usual occurrence when team communication lags. Every software developer, business analyst, tester, and people involved should be able to discuss the issues within a specific time. Otherwise, a small error can lead to a lot of confusion. We need to use test integration tools for logging defects, fixing errors, and facilitating smoother communication.

New stakeholder requirements

Nobody has the right to restrict your business from setting new needs and requirements when you test the product. Stakeholders can also take more time considering new business requirements in the next release. They might not always be time conscious. Ensure that the project management requirements are set as per business.

Lack of proper plans for the process

User acceptance testing would occur once you complete the regression testing process. The team has one last chance to check if the product is apt as per the development requirements. When there is a delay, it’s going to bring down the user acceptance testing time. Usually, we perform user acceptance testing at the stage of requirements and risk analysis phase. We need to identify the real-time use cases to execute further. Then, you need to communicate them to your QA team.

Providing personal opinions

Customers can point out mistakes just to show how superior they are. These comments might not make it more relevant to your team. You can avoid it if you build positive interpersonal relationships with them. It’s better to ask straight out for a reason and cross-question them a bit on what makes them think so.

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Best Practices in User Acceptance Testing

Use acceptance testing can be done correctly when you involve the correct practices. You need to be clear on your objectives and get going. Here are the most used user acceptance testing practices.

Identify and understand your target audience

Businesses should identify and try to know about them in detail. You wouldn’t be wasting your time when things don’t work as they should be. When you connect with your users, you must select your potential and actual users to conduct user acceptance testing. The development team should refrain from the user test. The feedback you receive from your user is quite useful.

Develop the best test plan

You can use the test plan, be it a guide or instruction manual, to increase the testing effort. It would help you understand the testing objective, general practice, and detailed activities you intend to perform. Ensure that you prepare all you need to reduce any obstacles for the user. When your user faces any questions or problems, you need to lend your ears to listen to them.

Come up with how you communicate about the bugs

You need to know what you need to do in case of an error. When users report a bug, you need to record the necessary information. You can use screencasts or screenshots to send the data about the bug to your team. This is why automated screenshot testing has been trending in recent times!

Define your Acceptance Criteria correctly

After you develop the product, you should have clear and well-defined acceptance criteria since they would define if your product is worth approval or not. Your acceptance criteria should be pretty testable. It must be understandable for everyone with a simple language and user-oriented perspective.

Observe how your customers react to visual aspects

Do they find the app more compelling visually? Do they find the colors attractive or too gaudy? Ask these open-ended questions to know what they think. UI testing is a must to determine these factors.

Do you want to know more about smart visual UI testing? Watch this video:

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Conclusion

User Acceptance testing is essential when you want to hit your full branding and marketing potential. Using the right testing tool can help you perform user acceptance testing correctly. You should also rely on the right test strategy, planning, etc.

Happy testing!

Software Quality Management: Guide With Best Practices

AmritaAngappa01 — Mon, 22 Jan 2024 15:52:26 +0000

OVERVIEW

Software quality management involves keeping a close eye on software development and maintenance to ensure that it meets customer expectations and is bug-free. It includes activities like quality assurance, testing, and continuous improvement. With quality management, you can deliver software that is reliable, efficient, and easy to use.

To build an app, developers should work on many factors, such as choosing their front end framework and the limitations of app size. Testers have to ensure that they do their job with a near-perfect notion to ensure there are no bugs or defects.

They may have to conduct several tests, including UI testing and online browser testing. Nobody wants to order their dinner on an app that would freeze each time you try to order. How do you ensure your app is on the top ladder of customer satisfaction caliber? That’s where software quality management comes into play.

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What is Software Quality Management?

A general definition of software quality management would be “a field of practice and study describing the needed software product attributes”. Simply put, your software should help your customers realize their needs by being defect-free and fulfilling all the quality attributes.

The software quality management process. aims at developing and managing the software quality where you can ensure that your product meets every expected quality standard set forth by your customer with concerns regarding the needed regulatory and development needs and requirements.

How does Software Quality Management work?

Generally, software quality management is of three types: Quality Assurance, Quality Planning, and Quality Control.

Quality Assurance (QA):

This is a systematic quality management process where you determine if a service or product would meet the needs and requirements of a customer. In quality assurance, you establish and maintain the needed requirements to manufacture products you can rely upon. With a proper quality assurance system, you can skyrocket customer confidence to the next level while you improve how you handle your work efficiently. Do you want to stay a step ahead of your competitors? Quality assurance is the key you need to unlock the doors.

No one can deny the role that ISO (International Organization for Standardization) drives the QA practices and maps the processes needed to implement quality assurance standards. For many companies, ISO 9000 is a set-standard approach to ensure they meet the quality assurance needs.

Starting from the manufacturing industry, it has slowly spread to most industries, including software development.

Quality Planning:

How accessible is your product to different users? How about the modularity aspects- can your developers reuse the code to perform the same action at various locations? How robust is your website when multiple customers log in? Answering such questions is where quality management and planning come into the picture. You address different aspects such as the market you intend your product to outperform, the release date of new updates, addressing potential risks, possessing quality goals, and developing the needed risk management policy.

Quality Control:

A quality control team’s job is to test and review if the software adheres to quality assurance standards and processes, be it as an organization or a project. Every software development firm has to prefer agile quality management since it creates a ruckus if you don’t adapt control procedures. One example includes following up on software review to ensure you address any changes in the previous test. Another one would be releasing software testing with the proper documentation support for the testing process.

So, what’s the way for software engineers to achieve software quality?

Every software developer must clearly understand how to carry out quality assurance through their project. Quality engineers should look at the activities they need to set when they begin the exercises. You must set suitable checkpoints at the required intervals for quality management purposes. Some practices like implementing BDD testing for quality test automation can also help.

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Benefits of Software Quality Management

Software quality = Software success. There is no other say in this claim. How does it help your business? Here you go

Increase in development team productivity.
Improvement in product quality.
Get more favorable, up-to-date, and precise defect tracking and test statistics for your website or mobile app test strategy.
Bring down rework costs as soon as you detect your defects in the software development lifecycle and software testing life cycle (STLC).
Take your confidence level to the next stage when you bring product development and test management strategies.
Save more time and budget.
Increase software credibility and quarterly profit.
Take your client confidence and customer satisfaction to heights.
Help with user experience aspects.

What are Software Quality Management metrics?

In a software project, you have the freedom to build the code at a point. Then, you would need to take a short break to check if you are doing the work the right way with key performance indicators in mind. To ensure you are on track, you can take the help of metrics.

Metrics are nothing but numbers or pointers helping us realize the three P’s- product, process, and project attributes. The product attributes include size, quality, and complexity. The process attributes talk about quality improvement and development speed. The project attributes would bring the productivity, number of resources, and costs into the picture.

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How important are Software Quality Management metrics?

They indicate the product, process, and project health. When you possess good metrics with data accuracy, it can help you to:

Develop a project, process, and product strategy, directing you the right way.
Recognize the area you need to focus on.
Make strategic decisions.
Drive key performance.

A test orchestration platform such as LambdaTest can help you maintain your software’s quality standards.

Here is a video on how a test orchestration platform can help businesses:

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What are the needed Software Quality Management metrics?

There are quite a handful of software quality metrics you need to consider. You need to do so for a better quality of your software product.

Meantime To Recover (MTTR)

We mention the mean time to recover based on the time taken by the developer to find a particular critical system issue, fixing and pushing the fix patch during the production stage. This is known to do more with the maintenance contract metrics, where you prefer the MTTR of 1 day with an MTTR of 2 days.

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Cycle Time

Cycle time is a metric similar to lead time, where you measure lead time as per user story and cycle time as per task. The time you take to create the database would be the cycle time, whereas the time you take to get your database completely ready is known as the lead time. We can use it to estimate the delivery timelines during future sprints.

Application Crash Rate

This measures how often a website or a mobile app crash occurs in an environment. This indicates code quality, which equates to the sustainability of the app with no crashing. Recently, agile methodology has found huge traction compared to traditional methods such as waterfall models and SDLC.

Lead Time

Lead time is the time you take between the project time or sprint kick-off towards completion. When we talk about the agile development process , we would be focusing on user stories delivered when the sprint ends. Hence we can define the lead time as the time between completion and delivery of the user stories.

Team Velocity

Team Velocity is quite a vital metric when we talk about Agile/Scrum. It indicates how many user stories or tasks a team has completed during the first sprint. Without involving the items, you move to the backlog along with the incomplete things. We only include fully completed user stories to calculate product release velocity .

Defect Count Per Sprint

These metrics would count the number of defects you find in each sprint. This metric can assess the user story quality during each sprint.

First Time Pass Rate

These metrics align with the agile principle of high quality and fast delivery. This indicates how many test cases can pass during the first run. This also would indicate the development quality. This would mean null defects were found in the code you developed.

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The stages of Software Quality Assurance

Quality Assurance is the first process when you start a project. This is where a team would define the functional as well as non-functional requirements of a product along with its use case. Every participant can check for compliance with all these criteria to deliver the best results.

Hence, what are the QA stages?

Broadly, we can classify them into discovery, plan, design, execution, and improvement.

The job of a QA team would be to define every functional and non-functional software need and check for business correlation along with objectives. Creating a document that describes the product in detail is also necessary. You can use it as a reference point for testers, developers, marketing teams, and stakeholders.

Requirement Analysis

In this, all you need to do is perform project analysis, understand the opportunities and perform a risk analysis to understand the risk hidden behind the test strategy. This is the stage where every project participant would meet product owners and stakeholders to understand their business goals and the end software scope. There are two phases: change management **and **casual analysis.

During change management, QA experts would identify the project areas where they expect a change to happen, analyze the benefits and impacts, and discuss further. The team would deny or validate any kind of proposal.

At the stage of casual analysis, when the project is in the active phase, a QA would analyze the performance while defining the problematic areas. The experts would understand where there was a problem and what they could’ve done to avoid any negative outcome.

Test Planning

Through any sort of test planning, be it UI test planning or automation test planning, we can familiarize ourselves with the situation. At the same time, we focus the planning phase on ideating the right moves. This phase is quite the same as discovery since it involves a lot of research and analysis. The methods are quite different, though. The stages include noting the project requirements, creating a software-oriented document, estimating the project scope and risk involved, and developing a risk analysis and management strategy.

Test Design

The main objective of a software development project would be to create a strong long-term strategy. A stable test design can help every tester and developer to follow good coding standards while guiding Quality Control teams and measuring the results.

Test Artifacts in the Design Stage

With digital transformation in full stream, we characterize the QA and testing stages through specific documents and activities. The artifacts include:

Test Case: A detailed representation of the testing procedure, conditions, results, and inputs.
Test Scenario: The problem describing a scenario realistically and believably.
Test Scripts: consisting of the instructions you need to perform for verifying a specific feature.

You can further break down the design stage into six steps: analysis, clarification, outline, defining test activities of software quality assurance, identification, and evaluation of the final state.

The design stage of any software quality assurance process would be ongoing. While the project is growing, the team would update the QA strategy, look for ways to reduce cost and time, and see if they can automate any processes.

Test Execution

In this process, a QA would be implemented through audits, reports, and protocols. The major task of a QA team would be to hold consistent testing documentation and the development process, measure how efficient the team is, and look out for the compliance of results with the needed standards.

Best Practices for Software Quality Management

Whenever a software team struggles to complete their application testing process, the best place to get started is QA and testing strategy. The right strategy would be to look for defects and segregate them according to the category’s type, severity, and priority. It’s also important to know the latest software testing trends to fast-track this process. The functional testing strategy should be planned with the entire life cycle of the defect in mind.

Other needed components would include performing non-functional testing on performance, user acceptance and application stress. Every high-performing software testing team can implement automation strategies while relying on different test management systems. People excelling would cover most of the code across different automated regression testing suites.

These are the seven practices you can apply for software quality management:

Separate the security testing and performance testing teams

When you test the performance and security of an application, it needs two important skills as per the evolution of new application technologies and security threats. These will bring down the individual team members’ capabilities.

Use a bug tracking tool for quality management

You need to remember how the bug has impacted your app or website. For that, you need to keep track of it. A bug tracking tool is the best way to combat bugs since you can mark a bug based on severity and priority.

Collaborate closely with your product development team

You need to be aware of what’s happening in your team. For this to happen, communication is a must. It’s always good to use test integration tools for smoother communication. For example, LambdaTest integrates with JIRA and Slack for project management purposes, especially to uplift communication within the team.

Try to simulate the end-user environment

A tester can meet the end-user directly, internally or externally. It’s a great way to uncover different issues of the software. This can help every team member test with end-users in mind.

Emulate the developer environment

To prevent QA teams and developers from going through undesirable application performance, the QA environment must emulate the development environment. As builds go through the development pipeline, you can test your code under different production environments while simulating customer environments.

Check out necessary code changes

It’s impossible to test every code. Hence, you need to prioritize significant code changes to fix bugs. You can use automation testing for repetitive tasks and codes that worked in the last cycle.

Make use of the two-tier test automation approach

It’s good to run quick sanity checks on each source code commit when you want to validate different code changes. You can easily run regression tests at night to provide immediate suggestions and feedback to your developers while focusing on the code portion.

Run regression tests

Running a regression cycle in the final stabilization phase can give you the necessary push when you move the application into the production phase. Since there would be few development changes, it’s a must to validate the complete application.

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Conclusion

Software Quality Management is essential when you want to build software which your customers love. To maintain the quality of the software, it’s essential to use the best cross browser compatibility testing tool on the market. LambdaTest is the name you need to trust in such a case.

With LambdaTest, you can test your website or app on Android Emulators , iOS Simulators and real device cloud. Ranging from Selenium to XCUITest, we support a number of frameworks to perform automation tests. What’s more? Testing would become quite simple and less time-consuming with our platform.

Happy testing!

What is Non-Functional Testing: A Step-by-Step Guide

AmritaAngappa01 — Mon, 22 Jan 2024 15:17:28 +0000

OVERVIEW

Non-functional testing involves validating the performance, reliability, utility, and other non-functional aspects of a software application. Further, this testing assesses a system’s readiness for non-functional parameters that aren’t typically addressed in functional testing.

Every software has its own functionality. You would expect a food delivery app to deliver your favorite dishes when you click on “Order food.” The job of a non-functional tester will be to test if you can easily navigate to the “Order food” button. They would also test if more than the ’n’ number of users could place an order simultaneously from any browser/OS/device configuration.

What is Non-Functional Testing?

Non-Functional Testing is a type of software testing that verifies the non-functional aspects of a software application. It is designed to assess the readiness of a system according to several criteria not covered by functional testing. Non-functional testing includes evaluating a system’s performance, reliability, usability, efficiency, maintainability, and scalability.

Non-functional testing is crucial because it deals with aspects that impact the user experience and the application’s effectiveness in the real world. It helps ensure that the software meets the established standards and provides a high-quality experience to the end-users.

Factors such as performance, stress resistance, and reliability aren’t related to functionality, in other words, how you perform the operations of a system. Yet, they determine how your users would feel when they are working on your software system.

They can be deal-breakers or deal-makers for software testers. Hence they deserve equal importance as functional testing.

Does it come under Black Box testing or White Box Testing? Obviously, non-functional testing is one of the black box testing methods since it covers the system’s external behavior instead of the system’s internal workings.

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Why do you need Non-Functional Testing?

We need non-functional testing to increase the product’s efficiency, portability, usability, and maintainability. This way, you can reduce production risk, which can hamper the release velocity of your product. You can also increase the ROI of your sales and marketing efforts while you reduce the cost directly proportional to the non-functional product aspects.

Objectives of Non-Functional Testing

The objective of non-functional testing is to verify the requirement specifying the criteria you can use to judge any system operation, such as maintainability, accessibility, performance, security, and availability. Some objectives include:

Verification of the quality attributes judging the system’s operations.
Detection of product behavior problems under simulation of different operations.
Determination of system compliance under certain use conditions.
Optimization of how you install, set up, manage, execute and monitor the product.
Collection and production of metrics and measurements to cater to internal research and development.
Create awareness of the product behavior and technologies we need to use.

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Advantages of Non-Functional Testing

Non-functional testing is the backbone of user experience for any software product. Here is why you can gain the upper hand over end-user experience if you involve non-functional testing:

Get end-to-end, top-level security features. Security is a fundamental feature through which you can protect your system from malware or cyber-attacks.
Make sure that the loading capability of the system is intact when the ’n’ number of users leverage it simultaneously.
Improve the system performance.
You don’t change the test cases. Hence all you need to do is write them only once.
You consume less time comparing it with different testing processes throughout the software testing life cycle.

Disadvantages of Non-Functional Testing

In spite of the advantages that you get with non-functional testing, there are a few challenges as well:

Every time you update the software, you have to perform non-functional testing
Owing to software updates, every person must pay extra when they want to re-examine their software. Hence their software expenses rise.
When the performance of a product is as per the expectations of a consumer with the needed efficiency under different circumstances, you can term it a reliable product. You carry out non-functional testing under the terms and conditions of what the customer would expect. It plays a crucial role when you want to satisfy a client’s expectations. Since feasibility issues might arise when you manually manage non-functional testing, we use a few special automation testing tools to manage these testing types

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Difference between Functional and Non-Functional Testing

With functional testing, you can perform mobile app testing or web application testing against different functional specifications and requirements. Here, the tester needn’t worry about the application’s source code. When you provide the test input, you must ensure that the output you received is right and compare both

Through non-functional testing, you test the system’s behavior. This type of testing concerns testing the system readiness per different non-functional parameters unaddressed by functional testing.

Here is the difference between functional testing and non-functional testing:

Do you want to know what’s beyond functional testing? Here is what Devender Sharma has to say in TestMu 2022:

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What are the types of Non-Functional Testing?

There are many types of non-functional testing. The most important ones are listed below:

Security:This parameter tells us how to protect a system from unintentional and intentional threats from external and internal sources. We use security testing to validate its efficiency.
Survivability:This parameter ensures that the computing system runs smoothly. This also restores the system when there is a system malfunction. We perform recovery testing to verify this.
Reliability: We use this parameter to test how your software system can consistently execute the needed tasks without errors. This is done through reliability testing.
Availability: We use this parameter to specify how much you can rely upon the running machine. We use stability testing to verify this.
Usability: This parameter checks how conveniently the user can perform, read and plan different inputs and outputs by contacting a specific machine. We use usability testing to verify this.
Scalability: This parameter refers to checking how expandable the software application’s computing power is to satisfy the never-ending demands and needs. We can use scalability to validate this factor.
Efficiency:This parameter can check how much the software product can manage volume, power, duration, and reply variations.
Responsiveness: It is a technique for making web pages automatically adjust to different viewports. In simpler terms, it means making web pages that look great on all devices. Responsiveness test ensures all users accessing your website using different devices will have a seamless experience.
Test for visual deviations: With visual regression testing, you can ensure that each element on a web page has the correct size, shape, and placement. A visual test compares a system’s visible output to its intended output.
Interoperability:This non-functional parameter validates the interactions of a software system with other software systems. Interoperability testing verifies this factor.
Portability: We use this parameter to check the software’s capability to switch from the current software or hardware application setting.
Flexibility: We can use this parameter to check how quickly and easily your program can run across different hardware and software setups.
Reusability:This means the software which you can adapt to use in a different program.
Documentation:Documentation refers to visual and written material describing, defining, specifying, and guiding users in their product operation. With clear, well-written documentation, you can get most of the answers to different user questions, which is a must for product success. Before you go live, ensure that documentation requirements are covered with documentation testing.
Endurance: Through Endurance, you can verify if the system can handle the load beyond a certain limit. It’s done to ensure that the system doesn’t experience a breakdown. You can sort it out through endurance testing.
Load: Load is a parameter used to perform system testing under different amounts of load on any software, website, or app. This is to design the system’s response to normal and peak conditions. You can then analyze the results to identify if there are any troubling areas causing degradation. Load testing can take care of this parameter.
Scalability: This parameter is used to check if the machine can cope with many transactions, different load conditions, and a hike in the data volume. Scalability testing can help you check this parameter under test design.
Volume: Volume can check if there are variations of data load at different time points. It helps us analyze to what extent we need to expand our database with an increasing number of users. Volume testing can help you check this parameter.
Stress: This parameter can determine if the system is stable after it reaches a breaking point. This is to check for availability, robustness, and error handling under a large amount of data that gets dumped into the system. We can make use of stress testing to handle this.
Recovery: We can use this parameter to test the ability of the system to recover from any potential breakdown within a short time period. This is also known as the system’s recovery plan from forced failure. We can use recovery testing to get this done.
Baseline: Through this parameter, we can validate if the required documents and specifications of the test case data are working right. We leverage baseline testing to check this parameter.
Compliance: Compliance is used to validate how well the development procedure is as a whole entity. You need to check if everything matches the IT requirements. We use compliance testing to check it.
Compatibility: Examine the compatibility of the software with many software and hardware configurations, be it browser versions, browsers, or operating systems along with third-party integrations and multiple versions. Compatibility testing would need access to devices, real browsers, and operating systems when you run tests to check the app’s behavior in different environments.

Continuous quality cloud platform like LambdaTest lets you perform cross browser compatibility testing of your websites and web applications across 3000+ real browsers, devices, and operating systems. With its real device cloud, you can test applications in real-world scenarios and get accurate results.

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How do you capture Non-Functional requirements?

When you perform testing, you focus more on functional testing to test the product functionality. But, we cannot forget how important non-functional testing is. We need to consider the testing requirements right from the start of the project.

We can use non-functional requirements such as the expected performance output from the software or the application under test. This can include the time the software takes to operate a unique system.

Non-functional requirements can also help you capture the user behavior when many people use the software or system simultaneously. Most of the time, the servers might be unavailable or busy, thanks to heavy load. The best example is a college website where exam results are obtained.

Hence you need to document the non-functional requirement properly. When you perform the test properly, you can also get high-end satisfaction in terms of potential customer usability.

Even though this testing doesn’t impact the business directly on the functionality aspects, you can amplify the user-friendliness and user experience to the next level. This will lead to high-end software quality.

In agile, you can capture the non-functional requirement using different inputs. These are a few ways through which you can capture it:

User /Technical Stories
In Artifact
In Acceptance criteria
User or Technical Stories

You can capture the non-functional requirement with technical or user stories. Whether you capture non-functional requirements in the form of a user story or any other requirement, both remain the same. The major difference between a technical story and the user is that the user story would require discussion and consist of visibility.

Acceptance Criteria

Acceptance Criteria is the point at which your customer can accept your product through user acceptance testing (UAT). You might also be unable to test the non-functional requirements in each story when you perform every iteration. Hence you need to add or test the requirements with only the relevant iteration.

Through Artifacts

You need to prepare a separate artifact to manage the non-functional requirements. This can help you develop a better idea of what you need to test and how you can do it in different iterations.

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How to perform Non-Functional Testing

Performing non-functional testing is easy and simple. Here is a detailed step-by-step method to perform non-functional tests:

Initially, you need to examine the system specifications and requirements
The tester would choose all the needed valid inputs in a positive testing scenario. This is done to check if the SUT can process them correctly. Also, we can choose a few invalid inputs and negative test scenarios to verify if the SUT can detect them.
Tester would determine the expected outputs for every input
Tester can also construct different test cases with your selected inputs.
The tester would then execute the test cases
They would then compare the actual outputs against the expected outputs.
They would also check if the defects are fixed after re-testing them.

Non-Functional Testing Best Practices

There are a few points you must remember to make non-functional testing memorable and productive. Here they are:

Don’t wait until the last moment to get non-functional testing covered.
The approach document before you conduct non-functional testing has to cover the test scope, test metrics, testing tools, important dates, and deliverables.
Stick to your requirements. Locate every NFRs and map them accordingly
Prioritize which tests need to be done first and last.
Ensure that your test environment consists of the same production environment setup, be it configuration, mentoring, or physical architecture.
Note down the run state to know if it’s at normal, failure, peak load, or latency stage.
Repeat the steps involved in the dataset, configuration, request load, and scenario.
Ensure that your NFR tests reflect real-time use cases.
Record everything that’s needed, be it response time or throughput.
Use graphs and other visual representations as evidence.
Summarize the test results for your TL;DR crew.
Take lessons from what you learned and fix those bugs and errors

What is Incremental Testing in Software Testing

AmritaAngappa01 — Mon, 22 Jan 2024 14:30:46 +0000

OVERVIEW

Incremental testing is an approach used during the testing phase of integration tests. It uses a number of stubs and drivers to test each module independently. This helps identify any errors or defects in the modules

Following the completion of unit testing, integration testing is performed in order to detect the interfaces and interactions between different modules. As the integration process continues, a variety of methods and technologies are used, one of which is incremental testing. In this approach, developers sum up each module one by one using stubs or drivers.

What is Incremental Testing?

As a developer, once you complete unit testing, you will need to perform integration testing. This process verifies how interfaces perform and how different modules interact. When you integrate, developers make use of tons of techniques. One among them is known as the incremental approach.

When you perform incremental integration testing, you can integrate different modules with the help of drivers or stubs to fix the bugs.

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Why is incremental testing important?

Incremental testing has its own set of advantages when you want to test a variety of elements. This is why you need incremental testing:

To ensure that different modules’ functioning is quite successful after it has been integrated.
Through this method, you can quickly identify all the defects before passing each phase. This would let every developer get an edge in identifying the core cause of the problem.
You can fix issues without requiring much rework and reducing software testing life cycle costs.

When should you use Incremental Testing?

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When a tester has to perform integration testing, he will find incremental testing as a boon. The major reason for this to happen is that both integration testing and incremental testing are the same way. When we perform incremental testing, we verify the system’s elements separately. This way, the testing specialist can achieve faster and better results to support the developers.

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Incremental Testing Methodologies

Before we discuss in detail about incremental testing, we need to know about stubs and drivers. They are nothing but the dummy or pseudo code we use in component testing or integration testing. We use them when one or more than one modules are under development, but you need to test another module.

We use stubs in the top-down test strategy. We can also address them as “called programs.” Through stubs, you can simulate different interfaces between the underdeveloped lower lever module.

On the other hand, we use drivers in the bottom-up testing approach. They are also called “calling programs.” Drivers can simulate the interface between different top-level modules which might not be available or are still under development.

Many of us might have a question needing an answer:

Why use a stub or driver before we test?
Why don’t we wait until we develop every application module?

The best thing to note is that developers would have to sit idle until every module is developed. This would also make it challenging to analyze the root cause of the defect. To prevent that from happening, we make use of stubs and drivers.

Let’s take a look at different Incremental Testing methodologies:

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Top Down methodology

As evident from the name, you can perform code-based testing from top to bottom. It happens right from the central module and ends at the sub-module. This method first tests the modules from the top application layer. Generally, we involve the structural flow of the application under testing when we use this approach. We can substitute unavailable or underdeveloped components or modules with stubs. This testing type, where you can integrate and test every module at the layer-side first, is called “breadth-first”.

Here is an example:

Module L: Login to the website.
Module O: Order what you want
Module Order Summary/ OS (Yet to be developed)
Module P: Payment to be made
Module Payment-by-cash/ PC
Module Debit Card/Credit Card Payment aka DP (Yet to be developed)
Module E-Payment/ EP (Yet to be developed)
Module R: Reporting (Yet to be developed)

For top-down Incremental Integration testing approach, these will be the delivered test cases:

Test Case 1: Integrate and test Module L and Module O
Test Case 2: Integrate and test Module L, O, and P
Test Case 3: Integrate and test Module L, O, P, and R

And so on other test cases are derived.

The next category would be “depth-first”.

You can derive the following test cases for “depth-first”:

Test Case 1: Integrate and test Module L and Module O.
Test Case 2: Integrate and test Module L, O, and OS.
Test Case 3: Integrate and test Module L, O, OS, and P.
Test Case 4: Integrate and test Module L, O, OS, P, and CP.

You can similarly derive other test cases.

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Why should you use Top-down Methodology?

With top-down methodology, you get to access early architecture defects easily. This can teach you how an application would work in its early stages. Through this, you can easily identify any design defects. You can also test the main control points as early as possible.

Disadvantages of Top-down Methodology

Through this method, you can test the significant modules later in the cycle. It’s quite hard to write different test environment conditions. You cannot call a stub a perfect implementation of modules related to each other. It would simulate only the data flow happening between two modules.

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Bottom Up methodology

Through this approach, you can understand that testing would take place from bottom to top. You can integrate and test the modules from the bottom layer first, and after that, you can sequentially integrate other modules as you keep moving up. You can replace underdeveloped or unavailable modules with drivers.

Here is an example to help you understand better:

Modules of healthy food, fruits, vegetables, citrus fruits, oranges, and lemons are under development. Hence we can substitute them with related Drivers:

For the bottom-up Incremental Integration testing approach, the following test cases will be derived:

Test Case 1: Conduct Unit testing for the Modules Orange and Lemon.
Test Case 2: Integrate and test Modules Citrus fruits-Orange-Lemon.
Test Case 3: Integrate and test Modules Fruits-Citrus fruits-Orange-Lemon.
Test Case 4: Conduct Unit testing for Module Vegetables.
Test Case 5: Integrate and test Modules Healthy food-Vegetables-Fruits-Citrus fruits-Orange-Lemon.

Why should you use the Bottom-up Methodology?

We can use this method for applications with a bottom-up design model. You can easily create different test conditions using a bottom-up approach. When you start testing right from the testing hierarchy’s bottom level, it means you can test critical functionality or modules quite early. This way, you can easily identify any errors and bugs. You can also detect any defects in the interface early.

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Disadvantages of Bottom-up Methodology

It’s quite hard to write Drivers compared to a stub.
You can catch the Design defects later on.
There is no working application until you build the last module.
We cannot call a Driver a complete implementation of any related Module. It’s just a way to simulate the data flow between two different modules.

Sandwich Testing methodology

Sandwich testing approach is a hybrid method of both top-down and bottom-up methodologies. We use stubs and drivers to manage underdeveloped or incomplete modules.

How do you perform Sandwich testing?

We identify a middle layer from which you perform top-down and bottom-up testing. We call the middle layer the target layer.
We then identify the target layer through a heuristic approach. Through this approach, you can choose a layer allowing minimal usage of drivers and stubs.
We can then start the top-down testing from the middle layer. Once we are done, we can move downwards towards different lower-level modules.
We call this layer present below the middle layer the Bottom layer.
We can also start the Bottom-up testing from the middle layer and move right towards the topmost layer modules. We call this layer above the middle layer the Top layer.
When you use stubs and drivers, you perform UI testing and functionality testing of different low-level modules, respectively.
Finally, we only have the middle layer left when we want to execute the final test.

Here is an example:

The following test cases can be derived with Sandwich Testing Strategy:

Test Case 1: Test A, E, F, and G on an individual basis — where Test A would come right under the Top layer test. You can also find Tests E, F, and G under the Bottom layer tests.
Test Case 2: Test A, B, C, and D.
Test Case 3: Test B, E, and F.
Test Case 4: Test Hand F.
Test Case 5: Test A, B, C, D, E, F, and G.

Why should you choose Sandwich Testing Methodology?

Whenever you carry out a big project with plenty of sub-projects, this method is beneficial. You can also run top-down and bottom-up testing methodologies parallely.

Disadvantages of Sandwich Testing Methodology

We don’t get a chance to test interfaces and subsystems thoroughly before unifying the modules.
The costs are higher since both top-down and bottom-up testing methodologies are involved
We don’t advise this testing type for a system with highly interdependent modules.

Points to remember when you perform incremental testing

It’s not rocket science to perform incremental testing for any well-experienced tester. These pointers can help you out when you perform incremental testing:

It might be a bit difficult if you want to find and fix those defects in every integrated component. To get that done, you can easily perform Incremental integration tests.
As soon as the development starts, you can fetch and fix those bugs as you perform incremental integration testing.
The incremental tests are quite faster in comparison to the end to end testing process.
You can easily find any existing system issues, such as corrupted database schema, cache integration, etc.
You can easily reduce software failure with incremental integration tests.
With this testing, you can easily check for any existing structural changes when a user shifts directly from one module to another.
You can fix those issues in the integrated modules when you want to reduce the bug count.
When you perform incremental integrated testing, it’s possible to cover a number of modules. This paves the way for much better testing capabilities.
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Conclusion

With incremental testing, you can quickly achieve the results you wish to accomplish from integrated tests. It’s always better to involve the right team to derive the best results. Integration testing, combined with incremental testing, provides developers and testers with the results they always aim for. The best development team, combined with the best test execution platform, can make this happen.