DEV Community: Bala Murugan

Understanding Black Box Testing - Types, Techniques, and Examples

Bala Murugan — Tue, 21 Dec 2021 10:04:10 +0000

Introduction

What comes to your mind when you hear the term Black box, specifically concerning testing? Well, it is something that is not very common to listen to but remains an essential form of software testing. So, it is a software testing technique to examine the functioning of software from an external outlook without digging deeper into its code. The best thing about Black box testing is that it can be applied to all levels of testing ( Unit, integration, system, and acceptance). Anybody with minimum or no coding language can perform Black box testing of a software product, software testers with no coding language can also do it.

What is Black Box Testing?

In a black box, we cannot look through the box to know what is inside; we only know from the outside that it is a black-colored box. Similarly, in the software testing field, Black Box testing is a testing technique to examine the application under test without stressing its design and internal coding structure. It is performed to inspect the behavior of the software from the outside. Hence, it is also called behavioral testing, i.e., how your software behaves under different situations without looking at the details of the code. In some or the other way, we all have tried Black Box testing in our lives. For example, while pressing the start button of a bike, we expect it to start without getting into its inner working mechanism.

In other words, it focuses on the functionality of the software without any need for coding knowledge. It includes software testing from the customer’s point of view, the user interface of the software. It examines the product-customer relationship, performed to find out the external factors that impact the success or the failure of the software. Black Box testing is done at the final stages of the testing process to examine the functional aspects of the software. It focuses only on the input and the output of the application.

Black box testing helps testers identify the following issues:

– Missing functions of the software

– Errors occurring while using the application interface

– Errors while accessing the database

– Errors occurring during the start and end of a particular function

– Issues in application performance and behavior

Black box testing tests the application, keeping the end-user in mind. It checks the usability, functionality, and the performance of the application as a complete system.

White box vs. Black box testing

White box testing, in contrast, is a testing methodology purely focused on the working of the internal code structure of the software. It requires an in-depth knowledge of coding to understand the way the software is built. Black box testing is not an alternative for White box testing. It is complementary to it. For example, if you are making a transaction on the website and testing if any faults occur while transacting, it is identified with the help of Black box testing. Whereas, if you look into the source code of the same website to check the functioning of a particular form, understand the variables, restrictions based on core coding knowledge, it is called White box testing. In other words, white box testing provides an internal perspective of the overall system, it checks the design and internal structure of an application using supreme programming skills.

Examples of Black box testing

Let’s have a look at a couple of examples of Black box testing to have a better understanding of this testing methodology.

Example 1: Testing if the word processor is working as expected. One scenario is to examine if the user can create a new file, save, open, or delete the existing file. Another scenario could be testing the functioning of editing tools like cut, copy, select, change font size/color of the document, etc.
Example 2: Testing Login Function of a website login screen. With the help of Black box testing, the tester will test if using a username and password (input) allows one to login seamlessly to the system (output). Here, the tester will not get into the function of the code behind it; he will just check the validity of the input given and the outcome received. If the user feeds a wrong password and does not get any error message, black box testers detect this and send it to the coders for resolution.

There are different approaches to execute Black box testing, like:

–Manually: By testing user data and error messages, check the UI of the application as a user.

–Automatic: It records the user interaction with the software to figure out errors

–Documentation: A type of manual approach in which the tester documents the functions that the software should perform without focusing on how it should perform them.

Types of Black box testing

With its growing scope, Black box testing has many types, out of which the prominent and most preferred ones are:

Functional Testing: It is the most commonly used type of black box testing in which the tester focuses on the core functionality, operations, and specifications of the software. Testers perform it by feeding input to the application for getting the desired output. It is usually performed before non-functional testing. Various types of functional testing are Smoke, Unit, Integration, User acceptance testing, etc., and can be performed either in a manual or automated way.

Non-Functional Testing: This type of Black box testing focuses on aspects other than functionality of the software like usability, reliability, scalability, and performance. Any issue related to these aspects can critically impact the user experience. Hence it is necessary to maintain the quality of the product. Various types of non-functional testing are load, performance, stress, compliance testing, etc.

Regression Testing: It is carried out after code fixes/changes or system upgrades to ensure any code modification should not impact the existing functionalities of the software. It is an essential part of the SDLC; any software must go through regression testing to handle unseen implications.

Techniques of Black box testing

We know how impactful and beneficial Black box testing can be to the organization in improving the quality of its software application. There are many techniques of Black box testing available for fulfilling software testing requirements. Let’s have a look at the popular ones to include in the test strategy.

Equivalence Partitioning

In this type of Black box testing technique, the inputs that behave homogeneously or yield similar outcomes are divided and grouped under one category. One input value from each group is picked and tested. For every group, one representative value is selected and tested. Testing each value in the group would be time-consuming. In this technique, only the representative value is tested from each group, making it easier to test many inputs at once, maintaining test coverage, and reducing rework.

Boundary Value Analysis

It is a popular black box testing technique that works on similar lines of equivalence testing. However, instead of testing the representative value from each group, this technique tests the boundary value of each input group (including both valid and invalid inputs). It is observed that applications face problems near the boundary, which means that the limit after which the system starts behaving differently.
Decision Table Testing

This technique is appropriate in conditions where the functionalities have logical input between them, like if/else conditions. Here different input combinations are considered. We use conditions (inputs) and actions (outputs) to examine system behavior using decision tables.

State Transition Testing

In this technique, the inputs/outputs and system states are considered in the entire testing phase. It tests the software application for a sequence of transitions of test inputs. It checks the system behavior changes depending upon what events have occurred/ or what input value is given. Events set off states which become scenarios that the testers test. For example: When a user enters a wrong password thrice, all three inputs will be sent to the login page. The third attempt will produce an error message for the user. This method considers all three system states and passes only the right state sequence.

Graph-based testing

A graph is prepared for the objects that the application consists of. Then based on this object graph, the relationship between each object is figured out, and a test is written to discover errors. It visualizes the flow and correlation of inputs and outputs.
Error guessing technique:

This testing technique is entirely experience-based. Here, the tester guesses the erroneous aspects (input/output) of the application. The judgment is solely based on his previous experience with the software behavior, functionalities, and impacts on end-user experience.
Apart from the above-stated techniques of black box testing, there are a few more, such as all pair testing and orthogonal array testing, comparison testing, etc.

Conclusion

To ensure that the software quality is maintained and you do not lose customers because of a bad user-experience, your application should go through stern supervision using suitable testing techniques. Black box testing is the easiest and fastest solution to investigate the software functionalities without any coding knowledge. The debate on white box vs. black box testing is an ever-prevailing discussion, where both stand out as winners. Whether you want White box testing or Black box testing depends upon how deeper you want to get into the software structure under test. If you want to test the functionalities with an end-user perspective, Black box testing fits the bill. And, if you wish to direct your testing efforts towards how the software is built, its coding structure, and design, then white box testing works well. However, both aim to improve the software quality in their own different ways. There are a lot of black box testing techniques discussed above. A tester can combine different techniques to reap the benefits of black box testing. Whatever testing method you use, the ultimate aim of your testing strategy should be to minimize errors and the risks of app failure and maximize software quality and user experience.

Business Process Automation: What is it and how to implement it?

Bala Murugan — Fri, 17 Sep 2021 07:36:00 +0000

The Pandemic has shown that Enterprises can bring drastic changes in a short span of time. There is always this question as to how did Enterprises scale up their digital transformation efforts in such a short time? And in some sense we owe it to automation and the advancement of technology. The pandemic has led many business leaders to think creatively and accelerate digital transformation in the organizations to deliver solutions faster than ever before. Many enterprises started to adopt various Rapid automation techniques such as Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Artificial intelligence (AI), Business Process Automation (BPA), etc. to meet the growing needs of the consumer and clients. These automation techniques have saved a lot of time for businesses and enterprises that spent previous minutes of production involving the boring repetitive manual tasks that are now completed with the help of computers. Let’s dig a little deeper into Business Process Automation and understand how it is helping businesses become more efficient.

What is Business Process Automation?

Before we get into the details of how we can make the systems more effective and our processes more efficient. Let us clearly define what Business Process Automation(BPA) is.

Gartner defines Business Process Automation as the automation of complex business processes and functions beyond conventional data processing and record-keeping. It involves running core business processes that are event driven, and often critical in nature as opposed to running simple data maintenance tasks.

BPA accelerates the way a business functions across different departments and teams to get the work done faster and efficiently. It assists greatly in streamlining the various processes involved in any organization, be it onboarding an employee, planning a marketing campaign, managing vendor payments, etc. BPA gets a lot of the boring repetitive tasks done in no time using custom designed rules and actions, and the best part is that it gets the work done as and when expected without any dependence on human resources.

Business Process Automation Examples

Here are a few helpful use cases which businesses and enterprises can implement to manage the business process in their organizations more efficiently.

Recruitment

There is a lot of paperwork and repetitive mundane tasks involved in the recruitment process in any organization. Right from posting about the job to finally hiring the desired candidate there is a lot that goes on.

Recruitment process Example – The paperwork involving the recruitment process is quite a lengthy process. Unless we learn to automate certain simple tasks like auto populating application data and disqualifying candidates who don’t meet the set standard; we cannot make the process more efficient. While the sample process above may not be the ideal automation process, we’d like to leave you with ways to think about automating certain tasks to make it easy for everyone.

Temporary Entry/Exit Access

When an employee forgets his keycard to enter the office building or infrastructure. The security team ensures that there is a thorough filing of paperwork to issue a temporary keycard to provide the right access areas on it. Here is snippet of the process.

Before automation

Access Key example – if you forget your access key, it becomes a tedious task to get a temporary key again. But if the process was automated with an app on the phone. There’s nothing like it. You can save precious minutes of the day and escape the frustration of not being able to get things done on time by automating the process of temporary keycards using a mobile app. Forgetting the keycard at your desk and going back for it, all of these can be avoided if we streamline and automate the entry and exit to the office premises.

Managing Vendor Payments

Many times organizations and enterprises rely on vendors to accomplish some tasks that they are not an expert in or need additional hands on deck for. This could be organizing a welcome kit, or getting a birthday gift delivered to an employee, etc. While the tasks get completed as expected, the payments sometimes become a hiccup as the approvals become a roadblock.

Vendor Payment Example – Dealing with the finance team can sometimes be a challenge. And going back and forth between the managers and finance team for approvals could be a time consuming task when you want to just get the work done and want to skip drafting emails every time you have to place a request from vendors. Developing an automation tool that everyone can use makes it easy for everyone.

Key considerations to implement Business Process Automation
Implementation of a Business Process Automation involves careful planning and execution to effectively automate tasks in a business function. Having a systematic approach will enable business leaders and developers to see through the changes needed to automate business processes. Let’s look at a step-by-step breakdown of how to implement an effective Business Process Automation.

Analyse Process Thoroughly

The First step before we implement any Business Process Automation is to understand the need for it. For that, we will need to understand the complete process and anticipate where automation can be of help. Understanding every step of the process will reveal inconsistencies and challenges which automation might be able to solve. Laying out the complete step-by-step process will give us a clear actionable area we can work towards.

Identify the Tasks to be Automated

Once we have a thorough understanding of the steps that are involved in the business functionality. We can then move towards identifying the challenges or opportunities where we can minimize the human effort and leverage automation. List down the specific task that can be automated no matter how small of a task it may be. When we compound these little tasks through automation we can be assured that the process will become more efficient.

Outline the Objectives

Once we have the list of the tasks that can be automated. We can then move towards defining the objectives of the automation system that will be in place. This will help all the stakeholders to have a clear understanding of how the business process will change and relieve themselves of the automated tasks. Outlining the objectives of the automated systems will also provide the IT team to develop the automation tool accordingly.

Change Management

Once we have identified, outlined and have the automation system in place, it is vital to communicate the same with the teams involved. Ensuring that a clear understanding about the process and conducting training sessions to the team will enable them to use the tools effectively and manage their work efficiently.

Measure Effectiveness

There is always a testing phase to check if the automation systems are working as expected and determine if they are an effective method to manage work more efficiently. Parameters like the Task Completion Time, or employee satisfaction, overall turn around time, etc. are valuable insights to measure the effectiveness of the automation systems. And since these systems are not meant to be static and change constantly with the business requirements, we can always tweak the system to produce better results.

Advantages of Business Process Automation

Digital Transformation – We are entering into a world which is technology driven, and BPA is here to accelerate the process of using technology to get the work done. Most businesses, if not all, are focusing on leveraging technology to accelerate digital transformation, and BPA is a step toward making that happen.
Efficiency – Business Process Automation helps teams and organizations to save time on manual tasks through automation. The automation of any task will not only save precious minutes of the employees but also increase the overall efficiency and productivity of the organization.

Accuracy – As there is very little room for human intervention in the Business Process Automation. We can be assured of a high level of accuracy as a result of human involvement being at a minimum.
Job Satisfaction – Many times, employees get frustrated doing the same old mundane tasks of the day. However, with the introduction of Business Process Automation, there is a sigh of relief amongst the employees. BPA helps employees focus on the more challenging tasks that require their intellect and gives them the satisfaction of accomplishing other productive tasks.

Growth – The time saved up through automation of tasks can help the organization focus on brainstorming to improve processes or bring in new ideas for better solutions. This would increase productivity and place the organization on the path of growth.

Conclusion

Business Process Automation is sure to accelerate growth and save a lot of time at organizations provided they implement BPA effectively. Understanding the daily tasks and various business processes that are involved in the running of the business is key to picking up on opportunities to resolve challenges through automation. While automating complex tasks might seem like a challenging task at hand, implementing Business Process Automation in a systematic manner will surely make it an easy process.

How To Test and Improve Website Usability?

Bala Murugan — Tue, 31 Aug 2021 08:54:17 +0000

The emergence of the information age and e-commerce has forced businesses to upgrade their presence digitally. While mobile, web and PWA apps are becoming the means of reaching new customers, websites are still the foundational building blocks of locating any business online. Gone are the days when your business was restricted only to a particular region or locality. Local businesses are investing in building a website for themselve to reach a wider digital audience. And Website Usability Testing comes in handy to ensure that the websites are user friendly and easy to navigate.

Business owners now understand the value of being online and have started to build their online presence by creating a website. However, some websites are not that great or user friendly or compatible, possibly because of various reasons such as page loading delays, User interface, navigational issues, etc.In this blog we will deep dive into understanding these issues and see how we can resolve them by introducing Website Usability Testing.

What is Website Usability?

Now, what do we mean by Website Usability? In simple terms Website Usability refers to the experience that a user goes through when he/she uses a website. Web Usability tests include a lot of elements such as website navigation, page loading, usage of image and graphics, content placement, scrolling, and all the factors which help with or affect the ease of using a website. Let’s look at some of the building blocks that make a website user-friendly and easy to use.

Elements that Affect Website Usability

1. Colours
The use of colors plays a major role in viewing your website. Getting the right color tones to convey your message plays a huge role in the way your website is perceived online. Having a basic understanding of color psychology would help you pick the right colors and keep your audience engaged as well. For example, If you are building a website for early childhood education, use of vibrant bright colors would make sense. Also restricting to a specific set of colors and keeping it uniform throughout the web pages, make the website more pleasing to the eye and appealing to the audience. You will need to keep a close watch on the color of your font colors as you would not want them to merge with each other, making it difficult to read.

Website Usability

2. Image/Graphic Usage and Placement
Even the most content driven websites like Medium, Entrepreneur or any other blogging platforms include images or graphics to appeal to the audience. Images are a great way to catch the eye of the users. Using relevant images on your website is key to enhancing the visual appeal of the website. You will also need to ensure that the images that are being used are of high quality, this would not only make the website look appealing but also very professional. The use of high quality images also brings the challenge of page loading issues, which can be rectified by optimizing the image to a particular size. While the use of relevant images is key, ensuring that you place the images proportionally is also a vital aspect that affects the usability of the website.

3. Readability
One of the first few things that we come across when we access a website is the content is positioned and placed on it. Thankfully most times we have legible digital fonts being used on websites, however, knowing which fonts to use plays a crucial role in enhancing the readability of the content posted on the website. And if the content on your website is not easy to read, there are high chances that users who land on the website will look the other way, simply because they are not able to read.

Some of the simple elements we can look at to enhance the readability of the website are typography, whitespace, text formatting, etc. Being aware of the font sizes you use plays an important role in the readability aspect of a website. Having the optimal font sizes for different screen sizes is non-negotiable. Ensure that your website content has enough room to breathe by including whitespaces, keeping a close watch of letter and word spacing. Other aspects include the text formatting, the alignment of the text, making sure that the content being displayed is consistent across the website will avoid any confusion to the reader. Use of lists, bullet points, text boxes, and texts on design elements like banners, topbars, menu lists, etc, affect the readability of the website. Keeping a close eye on these elements will ensure that your users enjoy their experience while reading the content on your website.

4. Navigation
The rise of responsive websites have made it easy for developers to build beautiful websites that scale up across different devices and screen sizes with much ease and compatibility. While navigation used to pose a definitive challenge in the past, the expertise and insight available today helps us at great lengths. Restricting the scrolling to the vertical axis, placing your menus at the right places and ensuring that the sub menus fall into the right buckets go a long way in making your website easily navigable. I still remember the times when I used to get so frustrated when I couldn’t locate a specific option or page on some websites back in the day. These days however, the information overload is neatly categorized making it easy for users to navigate to their desired webpages. A valuable tip is to add search bars on your websites as they provide easy access to what your users look for without having to scroll through unnecessary information and pages.

How to Test for Website Usability?

Website Usability Testing is never complete with checking the following list of tests when assessing a website. These types of usability testing will help you narrow down on the aspects to improve on the website to provide a seamless user experience.

1. Navigation Testing
Poor navigation means frustrated users who will never return. Not having the right structure/layout or menu options in the right place can drive users away from your website for not being able to access information easily or perform the Call to Action as expected. Some of the ways you can test for navigation is by getting a few participants to perform a particular task on the website and monitor the time and eye tracking of the users. The quicker a user is able to perform the task, the easier it is to navigate through the website. The tracking report will highlight the key problem areas where users might get stuck when using the website. Getting experts to navigate through the website and share their experience will also help you gather insight to improve the usability of your website.

Website Usability

2. Page Speed
A common issue that many website users come across is slow page loading errors. Site speed is an important factor that can make or break traffic onto your website, it is also given vital importance on the Google search algorithm as well. Ensuring that you optimize your website to load faster will enable potential customers to find information faster and possibly become your client. Keeping a close eye on page loading speed should always be a top priority in your website usability checklist.

3. Cross-Browser Performance
Imagine a particular website works well without any hassle on Google Chrome but fails running smoothly on Firefox or Safari. How can we be sure that the website performs well on all browsers and OSs? By testing it on different browsers and computer systems running different operating systems. Testing your website on a cloud based Cross Browser testing platform will not only ensure a smooth performance across browsers but also minimize the testing costs involved if you were to set up an in-house lab with the required browsers and computer systems. Apart from the affordability, you also have access to test your responsive websites across several devices with varying screen resolutions and sizes be it mobiles, tablets or desktop computers. Ensuring a consistent performance and compatibility across devices will ensure a free flow of customers to your website from different digital channels.

4. Search Engine Optimization
Making sure that your website is optimized for search engines, will provide a higher chance for it to populate on the search results. Various aspects of SEO include backlinking, Page speeds, image optimization, page indexing, content optimization, etc. Constantly optimizing your website to rank higher is key to attracting more traffic and visitors to your website.

Conclusion

Website Usability Testing enables developers to highlight the problem areas to work on or improve on any particular website. These pointers shared here are only a few of the many improvements that one can make on the website to make it user-friendly. The ultimate goal of any website is to assist users with accessing the required information in the least amount of time. Keeping a close eye on these aspects will surely help with making your website easy to navigate and use. We hope these pointers will help you improve the usability of your websites for the better.

Trends Of Robotic Process Automation, Artificial Intelligence And Machine Learning In Software Testing

Bala Murugan — Wed, 25 Aug 2021 09:31:49 +0000

The name Robotic Process Automation(RPA) is enough to describe itself. In other words, RPA is a kind of trending automation that can help switching from complete daily routine manual tasks to automating and optimizing the business process by seeking help from the tech world.

RPA is a great concept to adopt when there is a need to:

Automate monotonous manual tasks which are mostly:
Repetitive
Rule-based
Time Consuming
Requires more human efforts
Apply same RPA strategy across different industries
Use software robots or may be Artificial Intelligence

Adoption of efficient RPA process can further result in:

Enhanced accuracy
Quick improvements in efficiency and productivity
Maintaining compliance
Cost reduction
Early stage deployment
Client or customer satisfaction
As per global studies, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has been categorized in two parts:

Simple RPA: This refers to automation of any daily basis routine tasks that doesn’t require any high level of intelligence. For example, automation of data entry processes can be considered as Simple RPA.

Cognitive RPA: This refers to automation that involves human action or command for processing of the RPA. As an example, using Google maps to find the shortest and less traffic route to reach a destination can be considered as cognitive RPA.

How is Test Automation Different from Robotic Test Automation?
The terms Test Automation and Robotic Process Automation sound similar because of the common word “Automation” which offers the same feature of reducing manual efforts.

However, these two types of automation have a lot of differences. Let’s quickly have a look at the differences:

With regards to test automation, there are few myths of Robotic Process Automation. Let’s discuss the same and burst it.

Myth 1 -> Testing with RPA is similar to Test Automation :

Now that we are aware of the differences between test automation and robotic process automation, we know RPA has reached the next level of automation where no or limited coding skills are required. Unlike test automation, RPA can be used to automate anything with no dependency on the targeted system. RPA can be considered as a testing tool, however, it cannot be replaced with test automation. Moreover, RPA is not related to codeless testing tools and hence cannot be replaced with such platforms as well.

Myth 2 -> RPA can minimize the number of jobs in market

As per the report published by McKinsey Global Institute, the work done by machines with human collaboration is more effective, so as of now, there is no such studies in the market that can prove RPA eating up jobs. Thinking in a positive way, using RPA we can automate repetitive tasks so that professionals can focus more on other complex tasks which require human intelligence.

Myth 3 -> Test Automation tools can be used for RPA

Nowadays, the tech market is literally flooded with test automation tools like Selenium, Appium, UFT, etc. However, such tools cannot be used for RPA as they work on software products only. RPA is mostly applied to automate business processes and owns a different set of tools to fulfill the needs.

Facts about Robotic Process Automation

Experts have predicted that Robotic Process Automation is a biggest trend now in the tech world, based on the reports from CGI and other resources, below are few facts collected on RPA:

RPA tools can provide enhanced virtualization and analytics which are beneficial for business
Processing time with RPA tools can be reduced by 40%
RPA is a strategic decision, it is usually implemented after analysing the ROI
RPA has boosted up the growth of IoT and big data tech products
Using RPA, average 47% of the tasks can be automated

How Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Can Improve Test Automation?

Artificial intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) have transformed multiple sectors of the economy. Work sectors such as technology, finance, healthcare, education, retail, etc. are leveraging AI at various levels to automate tasks, make data driven decisions, and reduce costs.

Adoption of AI in software testing aims to make testing smarter and more efficient. With the use of AI and ML, different types of reasoning and problem solving techniques can be applied to automate and improve testing. As a result, AI can help reduce the time consumed during manual testing work so that teams can focus on other complex tasks and build a quality assured product.

Move towards futuristic app testing with AI And DevOps

https://youtu.be/yE5a-nGDTts

The current state of AI uses autonomous and intelligent agents referred to as “test bots”. These test bots are automated to perform activities such as application discovery, test generation, detect failures etc. Machine learning develops such test bots in a robust way to act under conditions of uncertainty. Below are few examples of AI-driven testing approaches:

Differential testing : As the name suggests, it extracts the comparison between application versions, classifies the differences and learns from the feedback as per the classification.

Visual testing : This refers to image based testing and screen comparisons to test the look and feel of an application.
Declarative testing : With this, the idea is to specify the intent of the test in terms of domain specific language and allow the system to figure out how to carry out the test by itself.
Self-healing automation : Here, self healing refers to auto detecting the element selection in the case when UI changes are made.
The test automation that we perform on daily basis is very uncertain and can be unstable when not utilizing the ML technologies, possible reasons can be:

The testing can become unstable in the case when UI elements are dynamic or can change over time by developers.

Testing stability gets directly impacted when the changes are made to the test data on which the test scripts are dependent.
Test automation scripts without ML are static, they cannot automatically adopt changes and overcome the consistent failures.
To overcome the above mentioned reasons and enhance test stability over time. One would need to make some tweaks with just a few test analysis abilities and self healing techniques. It is important to adopt AI/ML that could help test automation framework automatically identify the change made to an element, script flow that is added in predefined test automation steps, detect failures, provide quick alerts to fix or auto fix them on the fly. With such enhancements and capabilities, test scripts are mostly embedded to CI/CD pipeline that makes execution much smoother and requires minimal intervention of developers.

pCloudy Certifaya, An AI Powered App Testing Platform
The new trend of intelligent automation has proposed a new way of exploratory testing. The concept of AI Testbot has been introduced to reduce the burden on the QA team.

In exploratory testing, AI Testbot investigates and reports bugs in case of functionality crashes or unexpected errors pop-ups. For each test iteration, it has the power to store execution logs, video recordings and screenshots for future references.

Certifaya AI powered App Certification Engine
https://youtu.be/XApQU_BkP3w

pCloudy’s Certifaya features a testbot that allows a tester to upload an application that needs to be tested and sit back tight until the test report is handed over. The key feature of this testbot is that – it not only performs exploratory testing but also covers the cross device testing on different device variants. Once an application is uploaded and a session is triggered, the smart bot crawls inside the application without any human intervention and digs up each random corner case with a motive to uncover maximum bugs. As soon as the Certifaya session gets completed, an insightful report gets mailed to the team to document the test results.

Certifaya Report

The comprehensive report includes scenarios performed by the testbot along with logs and snapshots. The functionality performance score is also wrapped up in the report in the form of charts and graphs like battery chart, memory chart, CPU chart in addition to each frame rendering time.

In agile methodology where software is released in multiple small iterations and developers have to wait for rapid feedback from testers, the testbot plays a vital role in performing quick exploratory testing for new software versions and smoke testing for the entire build deployed.

Conclusion

Advancements in the Robotic Process Automation, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning technologies have made significant progress in recent years. The future of Automation lies in leveraging these technologies at the earliest stages to see faster testing and release of apps in the App testing industry. While these technologies are not restricted to the App testing space. We are sure that the contribution of RPA, AI and ML will significantly transform the app testing industry in the near future.

Chromium vs. Chrome – What’s the Difference?

Bala Murugan — Mon, 23 Aug 2021 09:57:13 +0000

Introduction

There are a lot of browsers in the market today. But, Google Chrome dominates the global browser market despite the diversity of browsers. Chrome is a web browser developed by Google whereas Chromium is an open-source software project also created by Google, whose source code serves as a building ground for many other popular browsers. Chromium vs. Chrome is a common debate. Even though their names look similar and are built by the same developer, they are different in many ways.

Statistics

Google Chrome leads the browser market globally and undoubtedly has been the only browser that has continued to be in the top position for the past many years. According to Statcounter’s latest statistics from June 2020 through June 2021, Chrome holds around 65% of the browser market, leaving behind Safari, Edge, Firefox by a major leap. Chromium, on the other hand, has a very niche market chunk with a specific user base. Chrome that way has been enjoying the monopoly in the browser market for as long as anyone can remember. But it is essential to understand the difference between Chrome and Chromium to find out their relevance in different scenarios. Let us unravel the mystery behind Chromium browser vs. Chrome in the forthcoming section of the blog.

Google Chrome vs. Chromium

This section covers Chromium and the difference between Chrome and Chromium fromChromium’s point of view.

What is Chromium browser?

Along with the release of Chrome, Google open-sourced and released a predominant part of the source code and released it as a Chromium project, in September 2008. It is an open-source and free browser released by Google, and its source code was available to the developers to make changes as per their needs. Chromium project has a community of developers, i.e., only the developers from the Chromium Project development community are allowed to make changes to the code. Since Chromium was the basis of Chrome, many developers from the community added proprietary code to Chromium’s source code. This implies that Google Chrome has more features and add-ons than Chromium browser, like:

-Installing automatic browser updates

-Support for Flash Player

-Widevine Digital Rights Management module

-Does not track Usage and Crash reports, and

-API keys for few Google services like browser-sync

-Missing Print Preview and PDF Viewer

There are so many browsers that are developed using Chromium as the basis. Opera, Microsoft Edge, Amazon silk are a few examples of Chromium-based browsers. Some users compile it and release browsers with Chromium Logo and name. Many application frameworks also use the Chromium source code.

How to download Chromium?

The most convenient way to download Chromium is from the Chromium download page. Once you open the page, it recognizes the Operating system of your machine and provides a suitable version of Chromium. Alternatively, you can select the desired version from the Operating system list provided at the bottom of the page. If you are a Windows or Linux user, you can recover the older Chromium versions by clicking on the Last Known Good Revision link. In the case of Linux, you can install Chromium directly from the Linux distribution software repositories. For installing Chromium on Ubuntu Linux- go to Ubuntu Software Center > Search Chromium > Select and install. The Ubuntu Software Center also provides the latest Chromium security updates.

Pros and Cons of Chromium Browser

Since Chromium is a free platform, most people benefit from it, especially advanced users and web developers. Most users like that Chromium does not track the browsing history or share information with Google about the user browsing behavior.

There are no restrictions on adding different types of browser extensions.

Chromium is frequently updated than Chrome, which is a good thing to note, but all those updates have to be downloaded and installed manually.

Unlike Chrome, it does not receive automatic updates. Chromium Project Websitereleases the most recent updates on Chromium.
Also, to play media on Chromium, you need certain licensed media codecs like AAC, H.264, and MP3, which Chromium does not support. This implies, if you want to use video streaming apps like Netflix or YouTube, you will have to install these codecs manually, or you will have to switch to Chrome to use these apps.

Chrome and Chromium have a security Sandbox mode, which is disabled in Chromium, by default.

Chromium does not have an inbuilt support system for Flash because Flash is not open-source. And ofcourse, Adobe Flash is not used commonly anymore, but some websites still need it to function properly. If you want an Adobe Flash player in the Chromium browser, you will have to add/write the requisite code for it.
This pretty much encapsulates Chromium’s side of the Chromium vs. Chrome discussion. Now let’s understand Chrome and the difference between Chrome and Chromium from Chrome’s point of view.

What is Chrome?

Chrome is a proprietary browser, developed and managed by Google Inc. Chrome is built on Chromium. It uses Chromium’s source code, with a few additional features. Chrome is a free-to-use web browser, but you cannot make changes to its source code to develop a new program from it. Chrome pushes automatic updates and tracks user browsing history. It even comes with inbuilt Flash support, unlike Chromium. Chrome has continuously topped in the history of web browsers capturing around 65% of the global browser market and remains unstoppable. This also makes it noteworthy to mention that the developers should always test websites that they make on Chrome, including its older and current versions, because not every user upgrades his browser from time to time. But,how would you test websites on Chrome?

Chromium vs. Chrome

You can test a website on different Chrome Versions in many ways. A few of them are:

Downloading Older Chrome Versions– Testers can test their websites on older Chrome Versions to check if they are working as expected. But this is a time-consuming process and unsuitable in the case of managing fast release cycles.

Cloud-based testing Service– Choosing cloud-based testing platforms like pCloudy would finish half the job. It provides thousands of real browsers to access different Chrome versions. The process is quite simple. The testers have to choose a preferred Chrome version and real device combination to start testing (manually/automated) the website.

Browser Simulator– Testers can use browser simulators in the initial development phases because the simulation technique does not work well in testing real-time scenarios like checking network connectivity or low battery issues, device location tracking, etc. The end-user will always use the website in real conditions and not in an imaginary scenario. So, simulators are a good option to check non-real aspects only.

How to download Chrome?

The simplest way to download Chrome is to visit a Chrome Website> download Chrome > Install Chrome. Depending upon the OS of your device, the website will suggest a compatible version. The download completes in no time.

Pros and Cons of Chrome Browser

Chrome is a stable and easy-to-use web browser, preferred by most users.
It has a Security Sandbox mode by default, which provides safe browsing, automatic crash reports and updates.
It supports media codecs like MP3, H.264, and AAC
It supports Adobe Flash Player
Chrome tracks the browsing history of its users, which is not preferred by many users. However, the user can utilize the incognito browsing feature available on Chrome, if he wishes that the browser remove his browsing information towards the end of the online session.

Chrome vs Chromium- Difference

Conclusion

We have discussed various points about the Chromium vs. Chrome debate. Now, which one to choose? It is a tricky question to answer. For Windows and Mac, Chrome is the best option because of its steady release. However, Linux users can go for Chromium but need to beware that it does offer a great range of well-supported media codecs. With no automatic updates, no adobe flash plugin, etc. Several modified Linux-friendly Chromium versions might be able to support these features. Chromium comes as a default browser in many Linux devices nowadays.

After knowing the difference between Chrome and Chromium and their strengths and weaknesses, we can say that choosing between the two browsers depends on your browser needs. Regular users can go for Chrome, whereas advanced users who value privacy should go for Chromium. Hopefully, all the information provided above would have helped you solve the Chromium vs. Chrome mystery. Happy Browsing!

Understanding Selenium Python Bindings for effective Test Automation

Bala Murugan — Tue, 17 Aug 2021 11:00:58 +0000

With many apps being developed at a rapid pace, testing and releasing the apps is starting to become a challenge. However, with the use of various rapid automation techniques and automation tools like Selenium, testing teams are able to test early, resolve issues and release apps faster. Selenium automation has proven to be an excellent tool to automate test cases for faster app testing. Selenium and Python make a formidable pact to accelerate testing of web apps. The Selenium Python Bindings helps provide a simple API to write functional/acceptance tests for the Selenium WebDriver. Let us dig a little deeper to learn more about Selenium, Python and language binding to understand the concept a little better.

What is Selenium?

Selenium is a popular open source automation framework that is used to automate your web app testing. It is used to validate web applications across various browsers like IE, Firefox, Chrome, etc. The framework even supports various programming languages like C#, Python, Java, etc. Selenium is not just a single tool but a test suite that comprises various tools that ease up the automation process of testing web applications. There is a dire need to scale up testing your web application and website, and Selenium fulfills this need through selenium webdriver python bindings.

Selenium Remote Control (RC)

Selenium Remote Control or Selenium RC, was introduced to tackle the problem of installing the application and the Selenium Core to perform the testing activities. Selenium RC was created to act as a HTTP proxy to overcome the tedious task of installing the entire application that needs to be tested and the Selenium core on the local machine. Now with the help of Selenium RC users can use various programming languages to automate their web app testing efforts. Selenium RC is also called Selenium 1.

Selenium IDE

Selenium Integrated Development Environment (IDE), is a simple framework that is part of the Selenium Test Suite. It is a firefox extension that can be used to automate the browser through the record and playback feature. You can easily install and use this plugin for building some basic test cases. For more complex and complicated test cases it is advisable to use Selenium RC or WebDriver.

Selenium Grid

Selenium Grid was developed by Patrick Lightbody to minimize the number of test executions in app automation. Selenium Grid can be used with Selenium RC to execute tests across different machines and browsers parallely at the same time. Selenium Grid is great for parallel test executions.

Selenium WebDriver

Selenium WebDriver is another framework within the Selenium test suite to automate different browser actions across different browsers. Unlike the Selenium RC or Selenium IDE, Selenium WebDriver uses a modern and stable approach to automate the browser actions while performing testing. It is also not restricted to any particular programming language and supports Java, C#, PHP, Python, Perl, and Ruby. It controls the browser by directly connecting with it from the system itself.

What is Python?

Python is a high-level programming language with diverse functions and dynamic semantics. It is used for various tasks such as website building, software development, data analysis and automation scripting. Python is a general purpose programming language that can be used for multiple tasks and solving problems. It is the most widely used programming language because of its beginner friendliness, easy to learn aspects. Python is used as the go-to programming language for writing automation scripts in the QA space. While there are a lot of ways that Python can be used in app testing, we will specifically look at Python binding for Selenium.

What are language bindings with Selenium?

Before we jump straight into Selenium python bindings, let us first understand the concept of language bindings with selenium. Selenium WebDrivers are used to automate browser actions directly from your system. Now, since Selenium supports all programming languages such as C#, Python, Java, etc. there is no one specific language that a user will have to use when writing an automation script for Selenium WebDriver. At the same time the code provided to you by Selenium to you as a developer is called the Selenium language binding. The bindings provided look similar to the language working in to make it easy to write the scripts. For example, if the python bindings will look similar to python, while the Java binding will look normal to the Java code. Language bindings help developers with an ease of working with selenium to automate the tests.

What are Selenium-Python Bindings?

Selenium Python bindings provide an easy to use API to write functional acceptance tests using Selenium WebDriver. The Selenium Python API allows users to access various functionalities of the Selenium WebDriver in an intuitive way. The Selenium Python Bindings also allows users to easily access various Selenium WebDrivers like Chrome, Firefox, IE, etc. The Selenium-Python Binding allows users to easily perform functions on Python to automate the browser actions for testing.

Tools required for Selenium-Python Binding

Python

Python Binding from Selenium

Selenium Package

Browser Drivers

Installation

You can install the Python bindings for selenium by getting the selenium package from pip. Python 3 has the pip available in its standard library. You can simply install it from there using the command below.

pip install selenium

We will need to use virtualenv to create isolated Python environments. You can even download and install the Selenium-Python Binding manually from the PyPI Selenium Package page. If you are running a Windows machine, you can directly install Python 3 from python.org and run it from the command line. For those of you who want to install from Git you can simply clone the official repository. You can access the Python code from the /py directory.

Drivers

You will need to have the browser drivers for Selenium to interact with the browsers. You will also need to ensure that the drivers are in your PATH. for e.g. you can place them in /usr/bin or /usr/personal/bin. Not including the drivers in the PATH will throw out a error as shown below –

selenium.common.exceptions.WebDriverException: Message: ‘geckodriver’ executable needs to be in PATH.

Here is a list of the most popular browser drivers.

Chrome: https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/chromedriver/downloads
Edge: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/webdriver/
Firefox: https://github.com/mozilla/geckodriver/releases
Safari: https://webkit.org/blog/6900/webdriver-support-in-safari-10/

Running Selenium Server

For those of you who want to use the remote WebDriver. Running the selenium server becomes an absolute necessity. Selenium Server is a Java Program. It is recommended to have Java Runtime Environment (JRE) 1.6 or newer installed on your computer to run the Selenium server. Once you have a java command in your PATH (environment), you can use the command below.

java -jar selenium-server-standalone-2.x.x.jar

Please note that you will need to replace the 2.x.x. with the actual Selenium version on your system accordingly.

Running Selenium Python Bindings

Once you have installed the Selenium Python bindings, you can start using it on Python.

Here is an example –
from selenium import webdriverfrom selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys

driver = webdriver.chrome()
driver.get(“http://www.pcloudy.com/”)
assert “pCloudy” in driver.title
elem = driver.find_element_by_name(“q”)
elem.clear()
elem.send_keys(“testing”)
elem.send_keys(Keys.RETURN)
assert “No results found.” not in driver.page_sourcedriver.close()

You can save the script into a file. For example – pcloudy_search.py and run it using –

python pcloudy_search.py

Code Walkthrough:

We are first importing the selenium webdriver which contains the browsers drivers like chrome, firefox, IE, etc. We are also importing the KEYS class which provides the keys like Return, F1, Alt, etc. on the Keyboard. Next we are creating an instance for the Chrome WebDriver. The driver.get method will navigate to the pCloudy page provided in the URL. The WebDriver will wait for the page to fully load before returning control to the script. Next we are confirming if the page title has the word “pCloudy” in it. We’re using the find_element_by_name method to look for elements using the name attribute.

The WebDriver also provides various methods to find elements, you can read more about it in the Locating Elements chapter of the Selenium Python Binding documentation. Next we are sending the keys in the control, this is similar to entering the keys using the keyboard. We’re also clearing out any pre-populated text in the input field (E.g. “Search”) to avoid it from affecting the search results. You can even send special keys using Keys class imported from selenium.webdriver.common.keys. After the submission of the page, we should get a result if the control detects any. We have also made an assertion to ensure that some results are found. We are calling the close method in the end to close the browser. We can also use the quit method to exit the entire browser. And in case only one tab is open on the browser the close method will exit the browser entirely by default.

Conclusion

Selenium Python bindings are one of the easiest ways to integrate Python with Selenium. The binding helps us in creating easy-to-use APIs to write the functional/acceptance tests for Selenium Webdriver. This way we can easily write test scripts on Python to test the various functionalities and browsers behaviours on the Selenium WebDriver. In the blog we have seen the example of using the Locate Elements method. However, there are many more methods to test such as the wait, navigation, page objects functionality in the browsers. Selenium Python Binding makes a power-pact duo in accelerating our web app and website testing efforts. We have attached a helpful whitepaper to learn more about automation using selenium, feel free to download your free copy.

TestNG vs. JUnit Testing Framework: Which One Is Better?

Bala Murugan — Thu, 12 Aug 2021 11:05:26 +0000

Introduction

Software Development goes through many phases like requirement gathering & analysis, communication, design, code building, testing, and release. A business has to ensure that the product they deliver is up to the mark, which is possible when the product goes through multidimensional quality checks. Testing is an indispensable part of the SDLC and can be achieved either manually or automatically. Unit testing is a reliable form of testing which involves testing each component of the software. Unit testing Frameworks like JUnit and TestNG present similar test roots, so the debate over TestNG vs. JUnit persists.

What is Unit Testing?

Testing is not a single activity but covers various testing scenarios. It is categorized in different ways, one of which is based on testing levels such as integration, unit, and system testing. Target-based application testing covers mobile testing, web and hybrid testing. Before moving ahead, let us understand more about Unit testing in brief.

Unit testing involves testing the tiniest bits of code of your software product. The aim is to check if the quality of each component of the code is performing as intended. It is performed at the development stage. A section of code is isolated to ensure its validity and accuracy. An individual component of code may be a function, module, object, or method. Consider any Software engineering; Unit Testing is always performed first before integration testing. It helps identify and resolve bugs at the early stages of the app development life cycle. Developers use different Unit Test Frameworks to create automated test cases of unit testing. There are different tools available in the market to perform unit testing like JUnit, NUnit, PHPUnit, JMockit, etc.
Different Unit testing Frameworks are used by companies to manage testing costs, enhance speed, efficiency, and accuracy. In Selenium – Java, JUnit and TestNG are the most preferred Unit Testing Frameworks.

JUnit was introduced in 1997 as an open-source Java-based framework for unit testing. It is a part of XUnit, which is a representation of the family of unit testing frameworks. It allows developers to write and run repeatable tests. It is used extensively along with Selenium for writing web automation tests. Its latest programmer-friendly version is JUnit 5, which creates a robust base for developer-based testing on the Java Virtual Machine.

TestNG is also a Java-based unit testing framework developed in 2007 on the same lines of JUnit but with new and improved functionalities. These new functionalities include flexible test configuration, support for parameters, data-driven testing, annotations, various integrations and many more. TestNG performs unit, end-to-end, and integration testing. TestNG generates reports that help developers understand the passed, failed, and skipped status of all the test cases. With the help of TestNG in Selenium, you can run failed tests separately using a testng-failed.xml file to run only failed test cases. The latest version of TestNG as of February 2021 is 7.4.0 as per mvnrepository.com.

It is imperative to understand the difference between TestNG and JUnit Testing Framework to decide which of the two automation testing frameworks are best suited for your projects.

Difference between TestNG and JUnit

Although there is no significant difference between TestNG and JUnit, they both are the top most Java-based automation framework and have their respective benefits and drawbacks. Nevertheless, let us try and understand the main differences between JUnit and TestNG frameworks in Selenium WebDriver:

a. Test Suites

Test Suites consist of a group of tests in JUnit and TestNG that allow you to execute tests simultaneously. The Test Suite feature was not allowed in the earlier versions of JUnit but was introduced with JUnit 5 whereas this feature was always present in TestNG. Although both have test suites, there is a key difference in how they execute tests on each. Let us look at the code snippets that show how test suites are run in both frameworks.
Test suites in TestNG are run from XML file:

Whereas in JUnit, annotations like @RunWith and @suite are used as shown in the code snippet below. Two classes JUnit 1 and 2 are written using annotation @suite .

Working with TestNG is easier for testers because it gives multiple options to them to work with the test suites. For example, test suites can be executed by bundling classes into groups.

b. Annotations:
Annotations used in both the JUnit and TestNG frameworks work similarly, just with a slight difference in their names. The following table displays the differences in annotations of both JUnit and TestNG.

In JUnit 4, @BeforeClass and @AfterClass methods are considered static whereas, there is no such restriction in TestNG.

TestNG vs. JUnit – Test Case Management
Management of test execution is an important task; TestNG makes this task easier as compared to JUnit. TestNG achieves this with the help of:

Grouping Test Cases: It is a feature that is available only with TestNG. It involves performing tasks by creating multiple groups. Each contains various classes and can run the test in an individual group rather than running isolated tests. It uses parameters in @test annotation.

In TestNG, groups are covered within an XML file under the “groups” tag which can be easily identified under or tags.

Ignore Tests:

Some tests from a huge test suite need not be executed, especially when you want to test a specific feature only. This feature clarifies if a specific unit test should be ignored or considered. Both JUnit and TestNG are equipped with this feature, along with all the annotations discussed earlier. In JUnit, this feature uses @ignore annotation:

Whereas in TestNG, it runs with @test (enabled = false) annotation.

Parameterization:

It means filling values/ parameters at each test execution. As a result, we get improved code reusability. It is data-driven testing that reduces code length and improves its readability. There is a difference in the way both TestNG vs. JUnit offers this feature. TestNG has a simple approach to fix parameters in test cases. It makes use of @Parameter annotation and adds parameters to the given test method. Value of “browser” is stated in the XML file (e.g., testng.xml), whereas JUnit uses @ParameterizedTest annotation.

Dependent Test: This feature shows when one test method has a dependency on another test method. JUnit does not support this feature whereas TestNG does. Since TestNG is recent, it supports many types of tests. In TestNG, the dependent method uses @DependsOnMethods annotation.

Exception Test : This feature validates the exception that is to be used while facing an error during test execution. Both TestNG and JUnit offer this feature with a slightly different way to handle the exception. TestNG uses expectedException parameter in @test annotation
In JUnit, assertThrows API is used for exception handling

Timeout Test: This allows a timeout feature in test execution which sets a time limit, which when exceeded, fails the test automatically. Both TestNG and JUnit provide this feature with the same syntax.

TestNG vs. JUnit – Parallel Test Execution

One of the most effective ways to test is by performing parallel testing. Running tests simultaneously and not in sequence on cloud-based Selenium Grid supports more parallelism than performing it on local Selenium Grid. Both TestNG and JUnit 5 support parallel testing.

TestNG vs. JUnit – Reporting

Reporting is a vital requirement in testing to analyze the test results. TestNG generates HTML and index reports by default. JUnit does not create any such report for test execution but provides data in XML file format. You will have to use an additional external plugin with JUnit to create the reports.

TestNG vs. JUnit – Community Support

Both TestNG and JUnit are popular frameworks among their respective communities. JUnit was introduced before TestNG, which is why it has a wider and stronger community support, comparatively. TestNG is catching up gradually, and its user base is also growing at a faster pace daily.

Conclusion

Automation testing is supported by many Test frameworks depending on what your testing goals are. TestNG and JUnit are amongst the most trusted frameworks for the automated Unit testing domain. TestNG overcomes the abnormalities of JUnit and eases the tester’s tasks. With TestNG, one can perform unit testing, integration testing, and end-to-end testing whereas JUnit only covers Unit Testing. There are so many differences between TestNG and JUnit, yet they have so much in common. So it became a dire need to discuss TestNG vs. JUnit in the unit testing context. We hope this comparative study helps you figure out the framework’s role in unit testing and help you choose the right one for your testing needs and business requirements.

How To Speed Up Selenium Test Cases?

Bala Murugan — Tue, 27 Jul 2021 06:57:31 +0000

Introduction

When we talk about automation, one of the tools that comes first to our mind is Selenium. We all know that the Selenium WebDriver is a remarkable tool for web automation. The primary reason for implementing Selenium automation testing is to speed up selenium tests. In most of the cases, Selenium performs extraordinarily well than the manual ones.

But, sometimes automation scripts generally run slower. Integration and Unit Testing are comparatively faster than Selenium tests. Sometimes a single test takes minutes to run, making it even slower when their number is more because of which it is difficult to get accurate and faster feedback. However, you can always speed up selenium tests using the best approaches to selenium test automation.

How can you execute your Selenium test cases faster?

There are various ways that testers can follow to speed up Selenium test cases. You can consider using explicit waits, web locators, prefer different browsers, optimize Selenium infrastructure, and consider other best practices for enhanced software performance. The process of maintaining Selenium test cases becomes cumbersome with so many updates in the end product. So, we cannot afford to ignore the Selenium test case performance; we should focus on accelerating them right from the initial stages instead. Key tasks of the Selenium Test cases in any given scenarios are:

Open URL under test utilizing Selenium Webdriver (local/remote)
Making use of relevant web locators, locate the web elements
Perform assertions on located web elements on the page under test
Relieve the resources used by WebDriver
Let us highlight a few of the methods to understand how to speed up selenium tests.

Parallel Testing in Selenium Automation

It is one of the easiest ways to expedite the Selenium test cases. Parallel testing allows you to execute multiple tests simultaneously on different device-browser combinations and OS configurations, covering the entire test suite in no time. If you have an in-house Selenium Grid infrastructure, you can always check the benefits of the Selenium Grid 4 and see what it has to offer in terms of accelerating the speed of Selenium test cases. Let us assume you have ten tests to run. If you run them on different devices, all the ten tests can be completed in just ten seconds instead of 100 seconds. You can opt for this method at class and method levels. Grouping test scenarios, their parameterization, and cloud-based options would further strengthen the process.

a. Grouping tests:

Multiple test methods and test files in the test suite makes the implementation difficult. If we group the test scenarios based on the type of functionality under test, it becomes easy to manage any emerging complexities.

b. Replacing Selenium 3 with Selenium 4:

Selenium has seen significant improvements with the release of Selenium 4. It comes with optimized Selenium Grid, Standardized Selenium Webdriver World wide web consortium (W3C), Enhanced Selenium 4 IDE, and additionally, it has also introduced Chrome Web Tools and relative locators. These improvements can significantly speed up Selenium tests. If we compare Selenium 3 and 4, we will figure out that the former uses JSON Wired Protocol for interaction between the browser and the test code which causes an additional burden of encrypting and decoding multiple API requests via W3C.

But the latter utilizes WebDriver W3C protocol which speeds up the interaction between the web browser and test code. The newly introduced Selenium 4 relative locators like – ‘above’ , ‘below’, ‘to_left_of’, ‘to_right_of’, ‘near’, speed up the Selenium test cases and improve their overall stability. Also, it is easy to upgrade from version 3 to 4 without any hassle.

c. Cloud-based Selenium Grid:

Whenever you want to test large-scale web applications where many parallel tests have to be run across multiple browser-OS-device combinations, you will need a cloud-based Selenium Grid to execute and expedite Selenium test cases. Below is a pictorial representation of Selenium Grid.

Choosing relevant Web locators

Web locators are indispensable parts of any Selenium test scenario. After locating the web elements, there is a need for an appropriate web locator to act further. It is always advisable to use faster web locators out of the many options available. Out of all web locators, the ID locator is the fastest one in Selenium WebDriver. Let us discuss in brief some of the most used web locators:

a. ID Locator: It works fastest

usingdocument.getElementById()javascript command which is relevant to all browsers. In cases where many unique elements persist, this command yields the first unique match. It works only if the HTML element has an ID attribute that is unique to every element on-page. In terms of execution speed, after ID, Name, CSS Selector, and XPath are the fastest ones, respectively.
b. Name Selector: The Name Selector web locator is utilized when there is no ID in the WebElement.
c. CSS Selector: If the WebElement does not have an ID or NAME attribute, choosing CSS Selector Web locator in such a scenario is appropriate. CSS usually doesn’t differ across most common web browsers and ensures better performance of CSS Engineusing CSS Selector in Selenium. Advantage of using this web locator is faster element recognition, lowered browser incompatibility, and reduced test execution. CSS locator is preferred in the case of legacy web browsers like Internet Explorer to provide better explicitness in comparison to XPath.
d. XPath: XPath Selector is the most flexible web locator, but it is the slowest among the fastest four locators because every layer of the path has to be crossed to select a particular web element and move from one browser to another. Using an XPath locator should not be the primary choice but should be used only when this is the only option remaining.
Using few Web locators: Keeping the number of web locators at a minimum improves the test script readability reducing the time taken in the execution of the Selenium script.
Explicit Waits: Explicitwait commands for automation testing will eliminate any slowdown and allow you to carry out wait conditions like Element is visible, Element is Clickable, Element is Selectable on-page Web Elements, which is not possible in the case of Implicit Wait in Selenium. For example, the ToBeClickable method yields a WebElement when the identified element is clickable. Explicit wait retreats as soon as the condition is fulfilled. It means the element is returned as a result and does not wait for the entire time duration. There is a code snippet below which shows the WebElement with ID = element is located within 6 seconds. After its location, the explicit wait exits, and the required WebElement returns.
Test Scripts that utilize explicit wait showcase better performance.
Create Atomic Scripts: Creating independent test cases by simplifying the complex scenarios makes the Selenium tests efficient. Frameworks like TestNG support explicit test dependencies between test methods, whereas atomic tests detect the failures easily, which reduces testing time, effort spent in maintenance, it minimizes test dependency, and accelerates the Selenium tests.
Disable images on Web pages for faster page loads: After creating the Selenium instance, you can open the page under test using driver.get() method.Many web pages are rich in content and composed of many images responsible for slow page load time. But the page loading speed can be accelerated by disabling image loading using browser-related settings.
The below snapshots show:
– How to disable page loading using Selenium Scriptsin Chrome(on Amazon website) to speed up Selenium test cases and page loading.
-How to disable page loading using Selenium Scripts in Firefox to speed up Selenium tests:
In this scenario, image loading is controlled in the Amazon e-commerce website where Firefox preference is set to 2 using permissions.default.image.
Data-Driven Testing for Parameterization: Let’s examine how to speed up selenium tests using Parameterization. When it is about testing against extensive data-sets, and running the same test on different test inputs. Parameterization proves to be a great choice. Parameterization is well supported by most of the automation frameworks like TestNG(Selenium Java), JUnit, NUnit(C#), PyTest(Selenium Python), etc.
Using headless Browsers /Drivers:
Headless browsers allow us to execute browser User Interface(UI) tests without browser Graphical User Interface(GUI). It also helps to improve the efficiency of cross-browser tests that run in the background. You do not require this best practice if you do not want to know about UI interactions received via test scripts. Some common headless browsers are HtmlUnit, Splash, PhantomJS, etc. Check out the performance of Selenium Browser Tests in context to PhantomJS Driver.

Conclusion

Speed of Selenium test execution is of crucial importance to the business. Even if they are slow, there are so many ways to speed up selenium tests. The aforementioned best practices help speed up Selenium tests, accelerate and reduce test times. Early detection of bugs in continuous testing leads to a faster resolution, which improves test performance and enhances product quality.

How does Cross Browser testing improve the User Experience?

Bala Murugan — Wed, 21 Jul 2021 05:02:27 +0000

Introduction

In the current digital scenario, technological evolution is inevitable, and businesses need to be constantly updated with the new technological changes that are taking place. The sustainability of any business is its ability to deliver products or services that solve user problems and provide an amazing user experience. To maintain the quality and ensure efficiency in the service, one must engage in standardized software testing to check if the actual outcome meets the envisioned one. Cross Browser testing is considered an indispensable part of the app development life cycle to achieve these results. It makes sure that your business web application is widely accepted on all kinds of web browsers. It guarantees a better user experience no matter which browser your users use to view your website or web apps.
Let’s talk more about how cross browser testing can ensure better user experience of your web applications, but before that, we should understand the basics of cross browser testing and why cross browser testing is important?

What is Cross Browser testing?

In simple terms, it is a method of testing the quality of your web applications to check whether they work perfectly on different web browsers or not. The testing verifies various aspects of the website, like its design, functionality, usability, and readability. Cross browser testing ensures developers and testers that the website or web app developed is compatible with different devices and OS versions commonly used by the user. The factors like screen size, screen resolution, Operation System Versions, Browser Versions, etc., keep changing. So, cross-browser testing becomes necessary to handle these changes and understand these diversities to provide a promising user experience despite the dynamic device fragmentation. The ultimate aim is to remove any discrepancies in the Website’s user interface and maintain its browser compatibility.

Why is it needed?

In the past, it was all simple when there were only a few browsers to use the internet on desktops; developers made quarterly changes to the code, and manual testing seemed easy with the waterfall methodology. Now, times have changed and there are numerous devices in the market. Devices such as desktops, smartphones, tablets, laptops, and way too many browsers with different variations in the market. In the current situation, using agile methodology, developers continuously integrate the changes on an hourly or daily basis. Even the rise of browser compatibility testing tools has eased the process and given a hand to the team to build a robust product.

Many business customers who own cross browser applications demand cross browser testing services. Inevitably, each browser responds differently to code changes making it risky. There is a possibility that any of the browser-OS-Device combinations might fail to respond to the changes. Since every browser renders HTML, CSS, JS differently, it becomes a challenge. Also, it is unrealistic to test so many browsers, but this cannot change the importance of efficient user experience. Every website design might not necessarily look the same, but developers can create and implement a responsive website design to accommodate the website features. That is why Cross browser testing is crucial to the business to manage these situations well.

When to start Cross browser testing?

Every organization has different testing needs and timelines. The sooner you implement testing in the initial stages, there will be fewer errors from the beginning resulting in lesser redundancies later. So, when the first page of the web application is undergoing early-stage development, it is the best time to begin cross browser testing. Is it too early to test in the very initial phase of software development? It might be too early and require more effort, but it will ease things as it progresses to later stages. So, starting earlier is always an advantage when it comes to testing.

It is entirely your decision whether you want to test manually or use automation. At an early stage, you can implement manual exploratory testing. As it progresses, you can automate the cross browser testing for regression and functional testing to broaden the scope of testing, inspect elements, and identify bugs.

No matter how you test or which browser compatibility testing tool you use, nothing should deviate from the aim of making the website and web apps look work perfectly. You must ensure that it performs well across multiple browsers as well.

How to perform cross browser testing?

Things to keep in mind before beginning to test are-

Firstly, decide how many and which browsers you want to test depending on the concentration of your user base. Google Analytics can help with the user data, but it does not cover the whole user traffic.

Secondly, choose whether you want to build an in-house device lab or test on the cloud? Whether to test on real devices or emulators? Owning a device lab can be expensive, and the cost depends on how many devices you want to invest in; it excludes the cost of replacement and buying new devices to keep up with the current market trends. Testing on real devices is always recommended, as it captures the real user actions and device response.

Thirdly, investing in cross browser testing tools can be a great move, as you can save the costs and explore speed, features, and the range of devices in a single platform.

Fourth, parallel testing on automated cross-browser compatibility testing tools enables multiple test executions parallelly, covering a maximum number of tests in very little time.

Finally, exploring features like live testing, browser screenshot comparative analysis, etc, also saves time and effort for the DevOps team. It gives them enough room to focus on building a quality product.

Role of Cross browser testing in improving the user experience
Convenient and Accessible:

Convenient and accessible website is the measure of customer satisfaction. It can lead to a better rank on the Google Search Engine as well. If a customer is facing difficulty navigating through the website smoothly, he will soon leave the website. CSS Gradient and CSS Opacity are inseparable aspects of UI/UX design which form the foundation of how design impacts the attention and focus of the user, consequently affecting the website usability. There is no point in offering a top-notch website but horrible CSS Gradients and Opacity that behaviorally vary from browser to browser. Although CSS Opacity is maintained across browsers, it might be incompatible with legacy browsers like IE or older. Also, by channelizing the power of simple native functions of CSS Gradients, the designers guarantee faster site loading without compromising on the resolution and clarity of the website.

Smartphone Compatible:

Different smartphones have different Operating Systems. Even third-party browsers like Mozilla, Chrome, Opera, etc, behave differently on Android and iOS. No matter which browser you access the browser with, the goal should be that it should be compatible with all of them. So that it can be accessible to a wide range of customers and also keep a check on the bounce rate. Cross browser testing helps in maintaining the operational capacity and accessibility of your website on devices like desktop, mobile, or tablets.

Better Call to Action:

A website is like a door to a shop from where the journey of purchasing starts. So, the face of a website should be one that attracts the customers to finally click on the Call-to-Action button for further interactions. The focus here is how uniquely the Call-to-action button is designed and placed on the website so that a customer knows where to click to transact. Also, to make sure that the functionality of your website’s CTA button has been tested across browsers and OS environments, end-to-end testing is needed.

Easy Navigation:

No user wants to get lost in the process of using the website. Navigation of the website should be easy and presentable. Even Google considers this aspect while showing the search results based on how well the content is placed on the website. Your website is the only spot where the user will purchase or fill up a form or perform any action on the website. And while performing these tasks it should not look like the user has an impossible task at hand rather it should be the easiest thing to do. Any technical glitch in the navigation of the website would be a loss for the business. Inconsistent navigation is a mobile browser compatibility issue that can be solved by resolving issues that arise from the browser compatibility testing.

Browser Compatible Login forms:

Every business aims to convert its visitors into customers. The login forms are used to register the customers on their website. Any discrepancy in the login form, like overlapping of notifications on the CTA button or hovering over the field title, is not a good design practice. It is indicated in the image below in the case of two browsers, Chrome and Safari. So cross browser testing in this case, is necessary.

Date/Time Fields:

These are used in many cases like profile creation, registration, calendar-based forms, etc. For any discrepancies in this case, a cross browser testing tool would serve the purpose and apply fixes.

User-Centered Design and Browser Sync up:

Cross-browser compatibility testing helps provide a better user experience while following the best UX design methods. Many user-centered designs can be ingrained in the website for a better user experience; if they do not support the user’s default browser, every effort will go in vain.

Website Template compatibility:

Many websites are built on website builders like WordPress that do not require any coding and provide endless templates to use. However, some website templates are not browser compatible and require the developer’s intervention. The incompatible templates can create issues in some functions like sliders, toggles, etc. So, these templates have to go through extensive cross browser testing before being presented to the end-user.

Image compatibility:

Every browser rendering engine has a unique way of working. Sometimes the images on the website break because the data processing rate of every engine has a different pace. It can happen even due to an incompatible plug-in and can disturb the UX of the website resulting in a poor experience.
Variable Fonts compatibility:

In modern web development, developers use various fonts, unlike in earlier times when there were many design limitations.Typography is a vital aspect of a web design that is not supported by legacy browsers like Internet Explorer. Heavy or modern fonts can lead to a slower load time that can further cause severe damage to the Google Search Engine Ranking of the website. Cross browser testing tools like pCloudy supports cross browser testing on the cloud. It checks website responsiveness testing, allows you to take screenshots, and provides various analytical charts to keep track of the performance of the web apps of websites. It also offers a selenium grid to perform automated, real-time live interactive testing.

Conclusion

Every organization is striving hard to be the best in the market by providing products of supreme quality. Cross-browser testing supports them by ensuring that the desired standard is maintained and the user gets the most efficient and user-friendly platform. More importantly, testing should be performed by both testers and developers to keep the UX quality intact. Various cross browser testing tools and platforms like pCloudy have made it easy to achieve a better user experience with cross browser testing, cost-effectively. Happy Testing!

Guide to Set Up Modern Web Test Automation Framework with Selenium and Python

Bala Murugan — Thu, 15 Jul 2021 13:28:43 +0000

Nowadays, it has been a dominant trend to deploy big releases on an infrequent basis without sacrificing the quality of the product. With every new deployment that introduces new features, bug fixes need in-depth end to end testing to ensure the success rate of deployment. The small product or projects can be covered up with manual testing but the products or applications that are huge in amount of features definitely require automation testing to provide maximum test coverage in minimum time. Such use cases can be achieved with the use of Selenium with any robust programming language, in this post we will be using Selenium with Python.

Selenium WebDriver is a web framework that permits automation of web based applications on various supported browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc. The selenium test automation framework enables you to define step by step interactions with a web application and adding assertions to uncover maximum bugs.

The Selenium web test automation framework can be used with different programming language like Java, Python, Javascript, Ruby, C#, etc. As per the GitHub survey, Python is the developers most demanded programming language. Python language has a smooth learning curve with easy syntax and concise code. Hence, selenium can easily be integrated with Python to automate the web testing process.

Quick Overview Of Selenium WebDriver Architecture
Moving forward, it is important to understand how exactly the Selenium WebDriver works. Selenium WebDriver is not a standalone testing tool, it comprises various components to fulfill the need of web test automation. Below is the diagram that depicts the architecture of Selenium WebDriver.

This image gives us a brief of the backend working of Selenium WebDriver along with the other components involved. Let’s quickly have a theoretical overview of these components:

Selenium WebDriver Client Libraries / Language Bindings: As mentioned above, Selenium can be integrated with any preferred language like Java, Python, JavaScript, C#, etc. Selenium Client & WebDriver Language Bindings are available on the Selenium downloads page to create scripts in any preferred language that can interact with the Selenium server.

JSON Wire Protocol: This protocol is said to be the heart of Selenium. JSON Wire Protocol facilitates communication between the code and browser by providing a medium for data transferring with REST API’s. These APIs are used to transfer data between client and server. Each Browser Driver uses it’s own HTTP server for data transfer.

Browser Drivers: Each browser has its own implementation of browser driver. The browser driver receives the command from the selenium based script that we write, executes it on the respective browser and a response is returned in the form of HTTP response. This is only possible with the help of JSON Wire protocol that establishes a connection between the browser binaries and the client libraries.

Browsers: Each automated test triggered gets executed on the browser installed in a local or remote machine. Selenium supports multiple browsers such as Firefox, Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Safari, etc.

Top Four Python Test Automation Frameworks

With the increase in demand for Python, the popularity of Python test automation frameworks has correspondingly increased. The frameworks play an important role in organising automation projects in terms of managing the order of script execution, storing results, presenting logs and adding assertions. Initially, it might be difficult to select one framework out of the multiple frameworks available but eventually it would benefit a lot in developing a robust test framework. Here we will look closely at the top four test automation frameworks demanded in Python:

1. Robot Framework: Robot framework is an open source automation test framework majorly used for robotic process automation(RPA) and acceptance test driven development(ATDD). It is supported with Python version 2.7.14 or higher.

Pros:

It is suitable for all types of applications like web application, mobile app, desktop app.
It is a Keyword Driven Approach(KDA) that allows us to create test cases in human readable keywords where no coding experience is required.
It supports native IF/ELSE syntax from RF v4.0
It provides a dedicated community support and multiple resources.
Cons:

Customization of reporting is complex.
Scope of parallel testing is limited with this framework but it can be achieved with Pabot(a parallel executor for robot framework).

2. Pytest: Pytest is the most used Python automation framework for testing. It is majorly used for unit, functional and API testing. It is supported with Python version 3.5 or higher.

Pros:

Provides fixtures that help in covering all the parameter combinations without re-writing the code.
Supports multiple range of plugins such as: pytest-randomly, pytest-cov, pytest-django, pytest-bdd.
Supports pytest html plugin that generates html report for the automated test suite. With just a single command the report can be generated.

Supports parallel execution of test cases using pytest-xdist plugin.
Cons:

Since pytest has a unique routine for writing test cases, it cannot be easily compatible with other testing frameworks

PyUnit: It is the default Python testing framework that comes with the Python package and is thus preferred by many developers. It is a unit testing framework that was inspired from JUnit, the most popular java testing framework.

Pros:

Since it is a part of the default Python package, no other additional installations are required to set up PyUnit.
Generates both test reports in a very quick manner i.e. XML reports and unittest-sml-reporting
Cons:

Sometimes, there is a huge amount of boilerplate code involved.
Since it is based on JUnit, camelCase naming method is used instead of Python snake_case naming convention

Behave: Behave is one of the most popular Python BDD(behavior-driven development) test automation framework. It’s functions are very similar to the Cucumber framework.

Pros:

It has a full support of Gherkin language for writing test cases in readable languages which further leads to the participation of other non-technical teams as well.
It has Django and Flask integrations.
Cons:

It is only preferred for black box testing.
And doesn’t support parallel testing.

Setting up Python with Selenium and Pytest framework

Now that we have understood about the architecture of Selenium WebDriver and a few testing frameworks of Python, let’s start with the installation of stuff required to run selenium based automated tests on Windows machines.

Step 1: Download Python for Windows and install the program. You can skip this step in case Python is already installed in your local machine.

Step 2: To install and manage any package in Python, PIP has to be installed in your local machine with Python. PIP is the package management system that can be downloaded from Python official site. Once downloaded, you can install the same by using the below command:

python get-pip.py

Below is the command to confirm whether PIP is properly installed or not:

pip –version

Step 3: Since we are using the Pytest framework to build our automation test suite, it is important to install Pytest libraries as well. Execute the below command to install pytest:

pip install -U pytest

Below is the command to confirm whether pytest is properly installed or not:

pytest –version

Step 4: For installing Selenium framework with PIP, execute the below command:

pip install -U selenium
To verify the selenium version installed, use the command:

python -c “import selenium; print(selenium.version)”
Step 5: To invoke our automated browser, we will not be downloading any browser driver specifically. Instead, we will be using WebDriver-Manager, which is an open source library to automatically manage different browser drivers.We can install the webdriver-manager by running the below command:

pip install webdriver-manager
You can verify if Selenium and Webdriver-manager are installed by running the command below:

pip list
With this, we come to the end of the installation of all the prerequisites to run selenium based automated tests using python. Now let’s quickly create a short test scenario to write a script upon:

Direct to pCloudy home page
Click on Login
Get the page title
Assert the login page title
To implement the above test scenario, here is the selenium-python script using pytest framework:

Code Walkthrough:

Initially, we have imported the libraries required to run our automation test. By creating a function, we have first used WebDriverManager to invoke our chrome browser. Basically, WebDriverManager checks for the latest version of the WebDriver binary, downloads it if it’s not present on your system and then exports the required WebDriver environment variables needed by Selenium. After launching the browser, we have passed the pCloudy homepage URL to the browser and have maximized the browser for better resolution.

Once the pCloudy homepage is loaded with the use of XPATH locator, we are looking for the Login button to redirect to the login page. Finally, we are asserting the actual title with the expected retrieved title of the home page.

If the assertion passes, the test case would get marked as passed, else it would be marked as failed. At the end of the execution, the running session would get closed.

Running Pytest Framework Test on pCloudy Browser Cloud for Cross Browser Testing

pCloudy is a continuous testing cloud that provides cross browser testing capabilities offering a wide range of browsers supported by real Windows and Mac machines. The platform named Browser Cloud allows us to access remote machines that are hosted on cloud which leverages us to use RemoteWebDriver in the Selenium automation framework. We leverage this to run our automated tests on cloud on different environments such as different browsers, multiple browser versions and different operating systems.

With the Browser Cloud test automation platform, it also offers manual testing of web applications on these cloud hosted machines. In case, if your automated tests fails on a particular environment, you can manually run that test on the same environment on pCloudy by just selecting the same environment from UI.

Let’s have a quick look at the Pytest framework based Selenium script below that would run on pCloudy Browser Cloud to perform cross browser testing:

sample_login_test.py

Note: In the above command, -n is used to specify the number of parallel test executions.

Code Walkthrough:

In our first script, we have used pytest fixtures which are basically functions that run before each test function to which it is applied on. The scope defined in fixtures – ‘function’ is the default value of fixture scope which means fixture will be executed once per test session.

To run our test on pCloudy browser cloud, we have defined our desired capabilities which include pCloudy authentication in the form of username and API key. In desired capabilities, further we have defined our desired environment where we want our tests to run on the operating system as Mac, OS version as Catalina, browser as Safari and browser version as 14.

There are few in-built capabilities of pCloudy that we have used to capture test video recording, performance data and logs.

To run our tests on pCloudy Selenium grid, we have defined the selenium grid URL as selenium_endpoint. The node machines connected to this hub will get auto assigned according to the test environment being used. In the end of the script, we are yielding the browser that stores and updates the desired capabilities of our automated tests.

In the next script, we have used the same selenium script that we have used earlier to assert the title of the pCloudy login page. This automated test would run on the pCloudy browser cloud on the environment : Mac-Catalina, Safari-14.

pCloudy Output:
To view the current running status of your tests, you will need to redirect to pCloudy device page and click on Reports -> My Active Sessions:

To view the all the tests executed till date, direct to pCloudy device page and click on Reports-> All Reports:

To view the logs and snapshots of a specific test, direct to pCloudy device page and click on Reports-> All Reports and take a action on particular session name for which logs and screenshots are required:

What is Cloud Testing: Everything you need to know

Bala Murugan — Tue, 06 Jul 2021 06:59:40 +0000

Introduction

Several years back, virtualization became a buzzword in the industry which flourished, evolved and became famously known as Cloud computing. It involved sharing computing resources on different platforms, acted as a tool to improve scalability, and enabled effective IT administration and cost reduction. In other words, it includes sharing services like programming, infrastructure, platforms, and software on-demand on the cloud via the internet. To verify the quality of everything that is rendered on the cloud environment, Cloud testing was performed running manual or automation testing or both. The entire process of Cloud Testing is operated online with the help of the required infrastructure. This primarily helps the QA teams to deal with the challenges like limited availability of devices, browsers, and operating systems. It also scrapes the geographical limitations, large infra setup, and process maintenance, making testing on the cloud easier, faster, and manageable.

What is Cloud Testing?

Cloud Testing deals with the validation of the software services provided on the cloud. In other words, it allows testers to access multiple resources like devices, browsers, operating systems networks, screen sizes, etc., on the cloud to test the app and scrutinize its viability. It uses cloud testing tools and simulates the real user environments to test cloud, web, and other installed applications on a third-party cloud environment equipped with infrastructure to perform cloud testing. It has been a revolutionary road towards strengthening the Testing as a Service model. Cloud testing eventually increases scalability and saves the cost and time of the QA team.

There are three main kinds of cloud systems:

Public Cloud: Public cloud services are open to the public where help is provided on a need basis.

Private Cloud: Private clouds are completely managed under the data privacy terms of the organization and available to closed users within the firm.

Hybrid Cloud: Hybrid Cloud, as the name suggests, shares a mix of characteristics of both public and private clouds. It depends on the organization to decide which services to be open publically and which ones private.

Types of Cloud Delivery models

Every computing service is available on the cloud nowadays, but cloud service providers broadly deliver cloud services using three models mentioned below:

SaaS (Software as a Service)– Involves sharing products like Email, CRM, ERP, etc., that are consumed directly by the users on-demand using internet services. For Example, Gmail, Google Drive, etc.

PaaS (Platform as a Service)– It provides an environment and required platforms to build or test your IT products on-demand. For example, it supports application development, web, streaming, etc.

IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service)– It is the most important component of cloud delivery and involves services like Cloud Migration

Here is a helpful comparison poster highlighting the differences between IAAS, PAAS, and SAAS

Why do you need cloud testing?

We all have tasted manual testing; it is not possible to test everything manually. Even performing automation testing is not a cakewalk; it is more complicated to set up and execute. The teams face many challenges in executing automation testing on in-house device labs. So, we need cloud automated testing to simplify the process.

Here is how:

Cloud testing eases the testing process as it facilitates tests for more users on multiple devices parallelly. QA teams can handle their respective test environments individually. In case the tests are queued, Cloud based testing expedites the tests without impacting accuracy.

Cloud based testing allows easy team collaborations, keeps them aligned with the project progress, and helps to track each team member’s performance from time to time.

Setting up an in-house device lab requires financial capital, dedicated human resources, skills, expertise, etc. To perform automation testing, testers need continuous access to the devices and test automation frameworks. Along with this, access to CI/CD tools, test logs, and screenshots, etc., is also required. It becomes arduous to handle all at once, but cloud based testing brings everything under one roof. Cloud platforms are pre-equipped with such features, making it uncomplicated for both developers and testers.

As the apps start gaining traction in terms of more features and users, it demands much faster, reliable, and extensive testing than ever. Cloud based testing easily handles the responsibility of ensuring that the software is capable enough to manage the increased loads as well as provide a great user experience at the same time. So, instead of going back to the in-house labs for the solution, it is better to depend on automated cloud based testing solutions.

Benefits of adopting Cloud Testing and Cloud based testing tools
We all know that Cloud Testing provides countless benefits to testers. Let’s discuss its advantages and why you should shift to testing on the cloud.

1. Scalability:

Organizations generally do not possess the complete infrastructure required to perform testing. And due to dynamic changes in the business requirements and standards, upgrading their in-house device labs becomes challenging and overburdening. It demands too much in terms of investment in money and expertise as well. Cloud testing solves this problem in a snap by providing benefits that are basic and yet important. It simulates the real environment and allows testing on a mirrored testing environment. Testers follow the easiest steps; they just have to sign up, select devices of their choice, and start testing on them instantly.

2. Cost Effectiveness:

Setting up your device labs will be a huge investment. Coping up with the changing business needs, buying new devices, new frameworks, new software, and licenses every time a new one hits the market becomes a costly affair, additionally you would have to spend time and money in maintaining the lab as well. Which is not at all a feasible option and seems illogical even when the organizations have the choice of opting for cloud testing solutions that can handle their testing needs.

3. Optimized Environment:

Cloud testing provides all the necessary services in one place, covering all software and hardware configurations required for testing successfully. Continuous Testing Cloud platforms like pCloudy ensure that every time a new user accesses any device on a real device cloud, it is in mint condition and offered with adjustable factory settings. After every test completion, the data is wiped clean for the next user ensuring data privacy.

4. Faster Output:

Cloud testing allows testers to run parallel and automated tests that significantly expedite the delivery of the output. Features like cloud collaboration also contribute to delivering faster results where multiple team members can access, review, and edit tasks in real-time, resulting in improved project management. This improvement in collaboration between diverse teams allows members to monitor their respective activities and avoid activity overlaps.

5. No Geographical limitations:

Testers can access Cloud testing tools to perform cloud based testing automation anytime from anywhere. It makes software testing and deployment quick and easy. It makes it easy to collaborate with geographically dispersed teams of testers and developers.

6. Streamlined Development Pipelines:

Cloud platforms like pCloudy allow easy integrations with tools helping DevOps and CI/CD implementations and building a much reliable and streamlined software development pipeline.

7. Easy Performance Management:

Cloud based testing tools are equipped to identify any issues related to the performance of the mobile or web application. It allows multiple users to virtually access the web application resources simultaneously and report any issues they face. It does not seem easily achievable with an in-house infrastructure where the team would manually manage these issues for all existing browsers. It is the responsibility of the cloud testing platform to keep the testing infrastructure updated all the time so that the users have no problem working on existing projects.

8. Better Test Management:

No product owner would want to leave any bug unresolved in the live web app. This can happen when there is a lack of coordination and poor communication between the Development and testing teams. This can result in a blunder for the organization. To solve this problem, the organization should look for a locally hosted web app that supports integration with commonly favored CI/CD tools and helps to build a strong delivery pipeline. Relying on trusted third-party cloud based testing tools simplifies tracking bugs, prioritizing tests and managing projects, ensuring bug-free apps.

9. Cloud based testing tools advantage:

Cloud testing tools provide test coverage, allowing extensive testing across multiple platforms, devices, browsers, simulated platforms, making testing faster than before. pCloudy provides cloud based Selenium automation testing tools that support various test reporting and management tools for proper analysis and test performance management.

10. Saves time:

Cloud testing allows running multiple applications simultaneously on different hardware so that the focus of testers is more on fixing bugs than handling this laborious task.

Conclusion:

Cloud testing is the need of the hour, aiming to bring efficiency, flexibility, scalability, and cost-effectiveness in achieving testing goals. Although cloud based testing has proved to be the best option in the automation testing area, few organizations are still hesitant to adopt it because of the challenges of data security, migration, integration, and simulation. But it is good to know that there are more benefits than disadvantages. Testing products frequently reveals all possible problem areas that can cause any damage later. In the present competitive times, the focus should be on leveraging modern cloud technologies to the maximum and reduce infrastructure costs. Investing in cloud based testing tools makes it possible to bring down huge infrastructure investment and accelerates the testing process. pCloudy makes cross-browser testing easy by allowing organizations to test their applications on multiple platforms, browsers, devices, giving you various browser-OS and device combinations. Cloud testing is a practical way of achieving organizational goals of every business requirement.

Understanding Selenium: The Automation Testing Tool

Bala Murugan — Mon, 05 Jul 2021 07:44:01 +0000

Introduction

With an increasing demand for test automation services, organizations are looking at investing in the best test automation tools for their business. Selenium is on the top of their list because of its numerous advantages. Research has predicted the growth of the Global Automation testing market to reach US$ 109.69 billion by 2025, which means that software testing is evolving and growing fast. The impact of Selenium Testing is such that it has turned out to be a game changer in the Software Testing world. Test automation has become more efficient than ever before, the high levels of accuracy that is achieved is saving a lot of time for the QA team as well. Selenium has contributed a lot in bringing this exponential change in the testing space and continuous development and delivery process.

What is Selenium?

Well, Selenium does not need any introduction. It is quite popular in the software testing industry and the most liked web-based software test automation tool that has set its benchmark for a long time now. Here is a list of a few of the features of Selenium mentioned below:

It is an open-source tool and does not involve any licensing cost, easily downloadable, and ready-to-use, which is one of the best features of selenium testing and a key reason as to why it is high in demand.

It provides strong support to the Agile Development and boosts Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery mechanism. It provides maximum test coverage.

It offers great flexibility as it allows performing different types of testing like performance, functional, compatibility, integration, system, regression, and end-to-end testing. And the best part is that all of these tests can be automated with Selenium.

Selenium tests can be carried out on multiple browsers like Google Chrome, Safari, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, IE, etc.
It offers multilingual support for various programming languages like Java, Ruby, Pearl,.Net, Python, PHP, C#.

It integrates well with test management and reporting tools like TestNG and JUnit

For achieving continuous testing it uses MAVEN, Jenkins, and Docker.

There is a lot more that Selenium testing can offer but, for now, this information covers enough basics to understand the impact of Selenium testing in the software industry. We will try to elucidate more on the features of selenium testing as we move ahead.

What is the future of Selenium testing?What is the impact of Selenium testing on Software Testing?

To answer these questions, let us dig deeper.

The software market is ever-evolving, and so is software testing. Testers around the globe understand and express the challenges of testing softwares manually which led to the introduction of Test Automation. Test automation has revolutionized the way software testing is performed. The open-source tools of software testing have given the testers more freedom to innovate and bring the best out of the testing skill. The concepts of Agile and CI/CD have contributed to this evolution.

Selenium testing has changed the face of automation for many developers and testing teams across the globe. What Selenium Testing framework primarily does is – it tests the web applications and validates if it qualifies to reach the production environment and move to the market-ready stage. Although a glimpse of what Selenium can do has already been shared above, we might also want to discuss a bit more about the impact of Selenium Testing on the future of the software testing world.

* Cost-Effectiveness:

It is a cost-effective software testing method that cuts down a lot of testing costs. This is also why most beginners prefer to start their journey with Selenium

* Ease of Access:

Since it is an open-source tool, anybody can download it at no cost. Any organization, from small startups to large enterprises have an open access to the tool anytime, anywhere.

* Cross-Browser Compatibility and Multilingual Support:

It is highly compatible with almost all the browsers like Firefox, Chrome, IE, Opera, and Safari. Selenium can effectively test the applications across browsers to check the cross-browser compatibility of the web apps. Developers enjoy this feature the most because it lets them develop the code only once before cross-browser testing. One of the features of Selenium Testing is that it allows the interchanging of languages as and when needed. The API can be selected based on the programming language, preferably Java, Ruby, Pearl, .Net, Python, PHP, and C#.

* Frameworks and Integration:

Selenium easily integrates with various testing frameworks. Here are some examples of unit testing frameworks it integrates well with:

– JUnit, TestNG based on JAVA

-NUnit based on C#

-PHPUnit based on PHP

-UnitTest, PyTest, PyUnit, Robot based on Python

-RSpec and Test::Unit –Ruby based

-WebDriver, NightwatchJS, WebdriverIO is based on JavaScript.

* Record and Playback:

Selenium IDE allows recording, debugging, and editing the tests. It records the actions to be tested. It automatically saves the recorded test cases, which enables retrieving tests for future use, an easy process.

* Community Support:

Selenium has a strong growing community which is also an official user group. You can find solutions to all your testing issues, tool tips, etc, here. The community even promotes high-quality information documents to make the most of the automation testing tool. The web community provides enough information and resources that you need not worry about additional training to understand the problem.

* Test-Driven Development (TDD):

Another useful feature of Selenium testing is that it can scale up to complex testing like production monitoring and load testing. Code flexibility and ease of updating the code are what the software team enjoys the most. TDD eases software developer’s efforts as the need to write the new code only arises when there is a failed automated test.

Disadvantages of Selenium Testing

Selenium might be the best automation testing tool available today. However, every popular tool has its sets of advantages and disadvantages. Let’s look at some of these disadvantages.

Selenium is a great choice for web-based applications, however, it does not support mobile and desktop applications.

Undoubtedly, it provides cross-browser support, but the scripts to work on multiple browsershave to be written using Selenium IDE for using them with RC, else the scripts only supportMozilla Firefox.
Selenium migration risks persist. If handled well, it guarantees good performance.

Selenium does not support Data-Driven Tests with manual scripts that have conditions and loops.

It is not equipped with inbuilt reporting and relies on third party reporting systems.

It does have community support but doesn’t have a full fledged technical support team resolving your issues.

It has limited support for image comparison.

Setting up a test environment on Selenium is difficult as it requires configuring several tools and plugins manually to support test automation.

Since Selenium is an open-source tool, no one is responsible for any morbidity in the new features.

Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Selenium Testing
One of the top trends in automation that are responsible for shaping the future of automation testing is the development of Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning. Although it is still in the inception phase, once it is established, it will change the game of automation testing.

AI and ML based automation cannot function independently without any human intelligence and intervention; both need each other (as of now). Also, as complete 100% automation is not possible, complete 100% AI/ML based automation testing is also not possible. Some of the automation testing platforms are already using AI in some areas like:

Test Maintenance: to detect changes and update the test flow
To provide test suggestions to testers after a failed or duplicate test

To create self-healing Selenium test code.
But, there still is a long way to go!

AI and ML based automation testing certainly looks better than Selenium unless the latter integrates the former and evolves with time to transform the future of software Testing. There may be cases where organizations need both for good reasons and both co-exist. But, nobody knows what the future holds for us, but the landscape surely looks promising and exciting.

Conclusion

What is the future of Selenium testing? Although Software testing is an evolving space, testers across the world still encounter many challenges. To overcome these challenges, the stakeholders look for promising test automation tools that suit their needs. Most of them look for cost-effective automation tools that offer maximum benefits. It is a huge responsibility to select the right automation tool because sometimes, even the best tool might not suit your organization’s needs. It is more of a strategic decision rather than any one-time decision. Selenium fits best in this kind of situation. In addition to a list of benefits, features like being open-source and cost-effective have created a special place among the testers because of the ease of access that it offers. Selenium testing ensures that the quality of the application is maintained and that only the best version goes out in the market. Other range of benefits like compatibility, and speed are attracting more and more global enterprises to shift to Selenium in the best interest of their business. Machine learning and Artificial Intelligence, if integrated with Selenium, will bring a significant improvement in the current automation scenario. AI and ML integration in the existing Selenium Automation will impact Selenium testing for the better resulting in a progressive future of the Software Industry.