DEV Community: DEEPIKA K

4 Most Common Myths Around Test Automation

DEEPIKA K — Tue, 19 Apr 2022 13:12:37 +0000

Originally authored by Rahul Parwal [https://testsigma.com/blog/most-common-myths-around-test-automation/]

A common theme among most software testing organizations is their escalating interest in Test Automation. While test automation has grown in popularity, there are still many myths and biases surrounding it. Such myths can unknowingly create a self-limiting boundary and negatively impact the possibilities of test automation.

In this article, I will discuss some common test automation myths and biases that people have towards test automation.

Note: “!=” operator has been used throughout this article to denote inequality. If you are not familiar with this operator, please read it as “not equal to”.

Test Automation != Test Execution

Automated testing is often viewed as executing tests. However, this is one of the most common misconceptions. Automation is defined by Wikipedia as a wide range of technologies that reduce human involvement in processes. It is often the execution of tests that consumes the largest portion of the overall testing phase. Automating this phase can certainly save a great deal of time.

However, Test Automation goes beyond Test Execution. Test Automation covers a broad range of possibilities. At each step of the testing lifecycle, there are a number of activities where test automation can reduce human effort. Here are some examples:

Test Environment Setup:
i. Installing libraries using scripts
ii. Setting configuration variables, etc.

Mocking Component Behavior
i. Useful in IoT & Embedded Software Testing
ii. Can also reduce (or eliminate) actual hardware/component need

Test Reporting
i. Generating summary report/email.
ii. Linking screenshots/logs to the reports.
iii. Triggering emails on test execution, completion, etc.

Rerunning failures
i. It is helpful to automate the re-execution of failure/flaky tests.
ii. It also helps to examine the consistency and probability of the failure.

Test Data Preparation
i. Creating synthetic test data
ii. Creating dynamic & random test data

Scheduling Test Runs
i. Based on schedules
ii. Based on continuous integration rules

Test Build Generation
i. Preparation of release candidates for testing

Updating results to ALM Tools
i. Ex: JIRA, Team Foundation Server, Polarion
ii. Using API endpoints

. Monitoring Production Logs
. Comparing Files
. Cleanup of Environment, etc.

“Just because you’ve counted all the trees doesn’t mean you’ve seen the forest.”

Anonymous

Test Automation != Quality Assurance

Over the years, Testing has been mistaken for quality assurance. A similar outlook is shared by Test Automation, which is often regarded as a quality assurance activity. Let’s look at the definition of quality to see how test automation isn’t quality assurance.

. One of the popular definitions of Quality is that it is “value” to someone “who” matters. Depending on context and personas, “value” and “who” take on different forms. Thus, quality is a multidimensional concept.

. By performing checks through tools, Test Automation will help you find information. Having such checks will enable you to find regression issues.

. With Test Automation, you can define checks to detect:
i. Functional Issues
ii. Performance Issues
iii. Security Issues
iv. Accessibility Issues
v. UI, Responsive Issues, etc.

. Quality will, however, mean different things to different people. Below are some typical software user personas:
i. Marketing Team
ii. Tech Writers
iii. Testers
iv. Programmers
v. Managers
vi. Customer Service
vii. Business Specialists
viii. Support/Sales

. Different notions of quality will apply to your context according to the persona of your customer. Here are some of the possible quality attributes:
i. Reliability
ii. Speed
iii. Usability
iv. Scalability
v. Maintainability
vi. Testability
vii. Documentability
viii. Trainability
ix. Functionality
x. Supportability

. While you may be able to control some of these attributes, the majority are beyond your control or scope as a test automation engineer.

“Quality is not what happens when what you do matches your intentions. It is what happens when what you do matches your customers’ expectations.”

Guaspari

Test Automation != Test Scripts

. Newbies in test automation often focus heavily on the writing of test scripts.

. Even though Test Scripts are one of the visible outcomes of test automation, there is more to it than that.

. Automation engineers perform several activities that are often overlooked. They include:
i. Modeling application
ii. Test data generation
iii. Developing framework / reusable libraries
iv. Work towards CI-CD-CT

-CI = Continuous integration
-CD = Continuous delivery/deployment
-CT = Continuous testing

.Documenting automation / Preparing readme documents.
.Logging automation
.Test design
.Defining test execution strategy
.Developing accelerator tools
.Code review
.Version controlling & tagging
.Configuring / Parameterizing

“Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.”

Martin Fowler

Test Automation != Coding

What programming language do I need to learn to be successful in test automation?”. On a daily basis, I hear this question from people. Yes, programming has historically been at the heart of automation. It is no longer the only way to automate.

. With the rise of no-code test automation tools, the obvious equation of automation = programming has changed.

. Today, You can automate test execution using coded tools as well as no-code tools.

. Automating reduces human intervention, and there are various ways and tools to achieve it without or with coding.

. If you are new to no-code tools, you can check out Testsigma which is a popular open-source no-code tool Testsigma. Here is the link to the open-source version of Testsigma: testsigmahq/testsigma: Build stable and reliable end-to-end tests @ DevOps speed. (github.com)

. Even if you are a beginner in the field of automation, no-code tools can certainly be used as a starting pathway for learning automation.

“No-code is the first most accessible step of web and software development. lt allows anyone to create software, visually, without writing code”

Ben Tossell

Other Popular Myths

Well, the myths don’t end here. Test Automation is associated with countless other myths. Here are a few popular ones:

.Test Automation = Automation Tools
.Test Automation = No Manual Testing
.Test Automation = Test Team Downsizing
.Goal of Test Automation = 100% Automation

“Everything really interesting that happens in software projects, eventually comes down to people.”

James Marcus Bach

Hopefully, this article has given you an idea of the various possibilities and opportunities you can explore if you are interested in test automation. These ideas are often overlooked amidst myths, biases, and unrealistic expectations surrounding test automation. It’s always a good idea to explore and consider possibilities that may work for your context.

Happy Exploring! Happy Myth Busting! Happy Test Automation!

Open Source for Testers – What, Where, Who, Why, When, and How- 5W1H

DEEPIKA K — Thu, 07 Apr 2022 07:16:40 +0000

Originally authored by Rahul Parwal [https://testsigma.com/blog/open-source-for-testers-what-where-who-why-when-and-how-5w1h/]

The open-source movement has become the most talked-about topic in the tech industry for the past two decades. We see a huge demand, inclination, and adoption of open-source software by organizations as well as software workers. This quest for open source will only grow with time, and as testers, this opens up an array of opportunities for us as well as testing and tech communities.

In this article, I have condensed my thoughts on Open Source for Testers. I will discuss Open Source using the 5W1H (What, Where, Who, Why, When, and How) approach.

What?

In terms of etymology, Open Source is composed of two words, Open, and Source. “Open” is a synonym for available, accessible, and transparent. “Source” stands for the source code or design.

In short, Open Source is any solution/program/project whose source code is freely available for use or modification from the original design. Open-Source solutions come under various licensing models which define the detailed terms for adoption, use, reproduction, and distribution.

i. In open source, a community or a group of people work together to achieve a common goal and share the output (updates/enhancements) back with the community.

ii. You might have already worked on open-source solutions even if you are a newbie. It’s everywhere and growing rapidly. Examples include:

a. Operating Systems
i. Fedora
ii. RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)

b. Programming Languages
i. Python
ii. C#

c. Code-Based Automation Libraries
i. Selenium
ii. Appium

d. No Code Automation Tools
i. Testsigma

“Open Source is a development methodology.”

Richard Stallman

Where?

The following are some of the areas to watch out for if you are interested in knowing, learning and contributing to Open-Source:

i. Open-Source Communities
ii. Open-Source Projects
iii. Open-Source Organizations
iv. Open-Source Mailing Lists / Forums / Discord Groups

“The power of open source is the power of people. The people rule.”

Phillippe Kahn

When?

A major reason for people’s enthusiasm for open-source contributions is the freedom that it gives them to work at their own pace and convenience. It can also be viewed as a passion project, hobby, or educational pathway.

“Open Source can propagate to fill all the nooks and crannies that people want it to fill.”

Mitch Kapor

Why?

Hopefully, you have already grasped the basics of open source and its presence in the tech/testing industry. We will look at some of the interesting prospects opened up by open source for testers:

i. Opportunity for Everyone: From beginners to experts, the open-source world always has something for you.

ii. Collaboration: Working on such initiatives will require you to collaborate with people from different backgrounds.

iii. Practice your skills: Learning a new skill/technology? Not sure where to practice/test them? Start with any open-source project and practice your skills. If you are a programmer, pick any feature/bug and try to add your implementation to it.

iv. Contribution Opportunity: If you fix any bug or implement a new feature, you can directly send a pull request to the maintainers and be an active contributor to that project. The opportunities for participation are not limited to coding, we will discuss other aspects of this in the later sections.

v. Learning Opportunity: Open-source communities are full of experts and talented community people. If you go there with an open mind, you will learn a lot.

vi. Know about the state of the art: Open-source projects tend to use state-of-the-art solutions that provide opportunities to learn some of the most recent tech skills.

vii. Building your portfolio: As you begin your contribution journey, you will soon accumulate a nice portfolio of your contributions.

viii. Networking: Networking is often an ignored aspect of such initiatives. Nevertheless, it could open you up to many opportunities.

“Once open source gets good enough, competing with it would be insane.”

Larry Ellison

Who?

Thanks to the digital revolution, open source is no longer exclusive to a small group of people. Instead, you will find a wide variety of people from all over the world.

a. In the Open-Source world, there are many contributor roles. Typical Roles are as follows:

i. Developers / Programmers
ii. Testers
iii. Automation Engineers

b. Similarly, contributor personas are also very diverse. Some of the common ones are:

i. Working Professionals
ii. Job Seekers
iii. College Students

“In open source, to really do something well, you have to get a lot of people involved.”

Linus Torvalds

How?

Once you understand the What, Where, Who, Why, and When, the most important question is HOW to start with the Open Source World?

Here are a few starting steps and checkpoints that will assist you in getting started with Open-Source:

Learn and get familiar with Git and Github:

i. Git is a source code versioning system. It will help you to collaborate on the source level. Git is used for source code versioning & collaboration in nearly every open-source project I have seen. Those new to Git can find a number of good tutorials on YouTube / Udemy to learn the basics. Go for it!

ii. Github is the most popular cloud-based code hosting repository which is used for the majority of open-source projects. It is quite simple to use and understand the GitHub UI, documentation, and guide.

Identify your Contribution Opportunity: As we discussed earlier, everyone has an opportunity to contribute. They can be seen under two major categories:

a. Coding Contributions: This will include contributions that would require you to work on the source code. This might be something you should take a look at if you are good at programming. You can contribute towards:

i. Product Features
ii. Bug Fixes
iii. Scripts for Unit Tests, CI-CD, etc.

b. Non-Coding Contributions: You don’t always need programming experience to contribute. One of my first contributions was adding documentation and reporting bugs. It was greatly appreciated and gave me the confidence to work more towards open source. If you’re a first-timer or not sure where to begin, you can always contribute towards:

i. Documentation
ii. Guides
iii. Raising Issues, Retest them, Providing feedback, etc.

Typical Flow for Contributing:

i. Learn about the existing implementation
ii. Modify / Add Something
iii. Get it Reviewed, Send a Pull Request
iv. Get Feedback

Positive feedback will most likely result in your Pull Request being accepted. Otherwise, you will most likely receive comments for improvement. Eventually, once your pull request has been reviewed and accepted, you have made your first contribution.

Take Initiative: You don’t have to always wait for someone to guide you on where to start. You can take initiatives and contribute to:

i. New Features
ii. Bug Fixes
iii. Updates to Existing Features

Hopefully, you now have a good idea of how to get started as a tester with open source. If you are a complete novice, here are some tips from my personal experience:

i. Start with small issues
ii. Build your confidence
iii. Have a Learning/Accountability Partner
iv. Have a Mentor
v. Get familiar with codebase/source
vi. Know that this is a journey and not a destination.
vii. Remember, there is always something for beginners.
viii. Coding is not the only area for contributions. You can do non-coding contributions too.

I hope this article helped you learn more about the various possibilities that open source has for testers!

“In real open source, you have the right to control your own destiny.”

Linus Torvalds

Happy Testing! Happy Exploring! Happy Collaborating!

A testers guide to deal with missed bugs

DEEPIKA K — Mon, 07 Mar 2022 05:26:48 +0000

Originally authored by Prashant Hegde [https://testsigma.com/blog/a-testers-guide-to-deal-with-missed-bugs/]

Even with the increasing adoption of Agile and DevOps, many organizations still consider testers the gatekeepers of quality and are solely held responsible for the quality and approving releases. Such organizations blame testers for a missed production bug.

No matter how much you test, a few bugs can still slip through the testing phase & reach production. Every software tester would have come across a situation of a missed bug. For many testers, it’s a terrifying nightmare. Such situations can be overwhelmingly stressful and scary!

This article will discuss how a tester can deal with a bug in production.

1. FIRST OFF, STAY CALM – FOCUS ON WHAT IS WITHIN YOUR CONTROL

Dealing with your angry customers and your annoyed managers while figuring out what went wrong requires you to stay calm. Get some breathing space where you can think peacefully about the next steps.

Do not get involved in the blame game; it won’t help anyone.
If you missed testing something, it’s totally fine to admit the oversight and take corrective actions. Accept the fact that no one is perfect all the time. Owning your mistakes will only increase your credibility.
Don’t Panic. Understand that no software is bug-free. Exhaustive testing is impossible with limited time, resources and budget. Additionally, your users may use your application in ways you never imagined.
Stop worrying about the past – Free your mind to focus on what is within your control. Help your team by –

i. Reproducing the issue – is the most significant contribution you can make to your team to resolve the issue at the earliest.

ii. Gathering more information – look at the support tickets, talk to the customers or support team, look at logs or monitoring tools

iii. Communicate with different teams and Identify the changes released recently. Verify if those releases introduced the bug.

iv. Identify a workaround – A user can complete some action in your application in multiple ways. If there is a workaround, unblock your users and let them know alternative ways of achieving the task. If required, work with customer success and support teams to communicate the issue and the workaround with your customers. Every missed bug to production need not have to be fixed immediately.

v. Roll out a quick fix – Work with your team to solve the problem as quickly as possible. Do not look for a perfect solution while sending a patch, but rather one that unblocks the customer soon. Ensure that you test the patch before the fix. Sometimes the fixes introduce new bugs. Identify the impact areas and explore them for risks before releasing the fix.

vi. Don’t shy away from asking for help from other testers to accelerate the release of the patch.

2. LEARN FROM YOUR MISTAKES – TURN THEM TO YOUR ADVANTAGE

See mistakes as an opportunity to learn. Think about ways to prevent similar mistakes from happening in the future.

i. After the patch is released, conduct a root cause analysis and investigate how they got through the testing phase.

ii. Brainstorm with your team about the possible ways to prevent similar issues in the future

iii. Identify the gaps in your process to avoid similar bugs in the future. Strengthen or change your process as per your context.

iv. Use the learnings to update and improve your test strategy, plan, test cases, and automated tests.

v. Use open-source tools like Testsigma, and start automating your happy flows. When automated tests help you find the obvious bugs, you can focus on deeper and more creative tests to uncover hidden bugs. Furthermore, give early feedback to your developers by seamlessly integrating with your favorite CI/CD tools.

vi. Ask yourself, could this issue be found in earlier phases of the software development. For instance, could this issue be caught during the requirements phase? Or during code review?

vii. Sometimes you will notice that some features/modules are difficult to test. Poor testability leads to more bugs. Improve the testability of such features/modules.

viii. Document and share your learnings with your entire team—track action items to prevent similar issues in the future.

ix. Introspect into what you could have done better or different. Seek help from your team if you do not clearly understand a feature/system/module.

3. ANTICIPATE ISSUES AND BUILD A SAFETY NET

Though bugs are inevitable, the consequences can be severe for the business.

So always anticipate bugs!

Have a rollback strategy in place to prevent or minimize damage in case of a bug leaks to production. Employ one or more of the following shift-right strategies or some rollback strategies to avoid or reduce the impact in case of a defect.

i. Feature flags – Have the flexibility to toggle on/off the new feature without deploying new code. In case of an issue, switch off the new feature.

ii. Staged rollouts – roll out the update to a subset of users first. Upon gaining confidence, you release it incrementally to the rest of the users.

iii. Blue-Green Deployments – runs two identical production environments called Blue and Green. At any time, only one of the environments is live and serves the production traffic. While Blue is live, green is idle, and vice versa. Let’s say blue is serving the traffic currently. When releasing a new feature, you can deploy and safely test on Green (which is idle). Upon completing testing, you can switch all incoming traffic to green. Now Blue goes idle. This technique reduces risk in case of an issue: if something unexpected happens with your new feature on Green, you can immediately roll back to the last version by switching back to Blue.

iv. A/B testing – Divide your customers into two groups (Eg – Free and Premium). One group(free customers) gets the new version of the software, while the other group(premium customers) remains in the older version. Monitor production until you gain confidence. Later roll out the new version of the software to premium customers. This strategy can minimize the impact in case of bugs.

v. Beta testing – Get the application tested in a real-world environment by early adopters.

4. EDUCATE YOUR STAKEHOLDERS – STRIVE TO BUILD A TESTING CULTURE

Why do decision-makers and executives think that “Testers are responsible for missed bugs” or “Quality is the sole responsibility of a tester”? It’s primarily because of a lack of awareness about testing and the role of a tester. The first step to building a testing culture is to educate your organization about testing by debunking myths.

Testers explore, learn, investigate and test the software to provide information about the quality of the software and the associated risks to the business. This valuable information enables businesses to make informed decisions. Some executives and managers have the old-school mentality that testers are gatekeepers of quality. Several managers are aware that “Testing is everyone’s responsibility,” but they do not know how to involve developers, product managers, and other non-testers in testing activities.

As a tester, coach the whole team has to take up testing responsibilities within the software development. Below are some ideas –

Hold three amigo meetings – A meeting where the Product Manager, Developer, and tester meet to discuss the requirements before development.

i. Enables everyone to be on the same page about requirements and the scope of the testing.

ii. Collaborate to find ambiguities at the early stages(requirement, design, etc.) to avoid rework and save costs.

Make unit testing a part of the definition of done. Furthermore, start measuring and publishing unit test coverage in your test reports.
Encourage quality practices like Test-Driven Development, code reviews, test case reviews, etc.
Teach developers to test – conduct pair testing sessions with your developers.
Tools like Testsigma enable the entire team, including devs, QA teams, & PMs, to contribute to automation without requiring advanced programming skills.
Conduct bug bashes – bug bashing fosters a shared sense of quality by involving the entire organization in testing and finding problems before the release.
Eat your own dog food – have your organization use its product in your day-to-day operations. Have a mechanism to collect feedback and improve continuously.

CONCLUSION

When testing complex applications, you cannot find every possible bug in limited time, resources and budget. Implement risk-based testing – prioritize testing those areas of the application that are most critical to the business. Realize that QA cannot assure quality but only assess the quality of a product. Anticipate issues and have a plan to rollback without impacting the customers. Furthermore, build a culture where everyone contributes to testing.

As long as you learn from your mistakes and constantly improve – A missed production is a blessing in disguise. A missed bug teaches you the lessons you will not forget, which no testing books teach you.

Testsigma raises $4.6M from Accel and STRIVE to simplify test automation

DEEPIKA K — Wed, 02 Mar 2022 05:52:22 +0000

I’m happy to announce our financing of $4.6M led by Accel and STRIVE, with participation from BoldCap and a host of well known entrepreneurs and operators 🎉

These include Shanmugam Krishnasamy, co-founder and CTO of Freshworks; Kiran Darisi, co-founder and VP of engineering at Freshworks; Parsuram Vijayasankar, co-founder and principal engineer at Freshworks; Vetri Vellore, CEO of Ally.io; Nitesh Banta, CEO at B12; Ioann Fainsilber, Co-Founder at Pintek, among others.

I’m grateful to the entire Testsigma team, our users, partners as we celebrate this huge milestone! And, I would like to welcome our investors to this exciting journey!

With an increasing focus on automation and DevOps, software delivery is faster than ever before! Automated testing is essential for balancing software quality with the accelerated velocity of release cycles, but because the toolchain that is supposed to enable automated testing has many moving parts, test automation becomes a parallel development project in organizations. Plus they have huge upfront and ongoing resource, tech, and expertise costs.

Today’s test stacks have made test automation more about writing and maintaining scripts than about taking quality software to market as quickly as possible.

What we’re trying to do at Testsigma is not just simplify test automation to speed up the testing, but also make it a sustainable, scalable process in which the tools and frameworks don’t require ongoing maintenance, freeing up the teams to focus on value delivery instead of building and maintaining scripts and frameworks.

Thousands of developers, QAs, product managers across the world at teams like Sage, HPE, Netgear, HDFC Life, IEEE, SignEasy, American Psychological Association, Mehiläinen, and more use Testsigma to test continuously throughout their software delivery cycles.

Since our beta launch we have run 1.5M+ tests for hundreds of products, and on boarded 1000+ users, we are now we have got all the power to accelerate our growth.

We will use the capital to strengthen the core engineering and product team and to build alongside and for a global community of testers, test automation engineers, and developers.

I would like to take this opportunity to share with you our next steps, what we will be focusing on, our road map, and how we are thinning and shaping this platform.

Our focus areas:

i. Bringing standardization to a fragmented testing toolchain
ii.Enabling faster, more scalable test automation
iii.Improving stability and reliability of automated tests
iv. Leverage AI to build an autonomous testing platform
v. Extend to solve for complex test automation requirements
vi. Enabling everyone in modern teams to test for faster releases
vii. Grow our community and build Testsigma as an open source project

The current test stack is broken & needs a fresh approach

Our founding team has been part of multiple product teams for various organizations, with each one of us being part of product teams for around 15 years. We have seen test automation problems first hand many times and helped the teams build scalable test automation processes.

In that time we’ve primarily seen two types of test automation approaches implemented, both being imperfect:

1. Custom built frameworks

Most teams prefer building a custom test stack/framework because of the flexibility but there are significant drawbacks:

i. We realized that the modern test stack is fragmented. It has too many moving parts to be easy to set up and scale.

ii. Given there are so many use cases, languages and app types, test automation becomes overwhelmingly complex & time consuming to the point where it becomes its own development project.

2. Scriptless tools powered by AI

Modern tools are simple to begin with but don’t scale for complex setups and constantly evolving applications.

It became clear to us that simple, no-code, AI powered solutions are vendor dependent in terms of flexibility required for scale, whereas custom built solutions require intensive complex dev and integration efforts to both build and maintain over time. As a consequence, almost two-thirds of all teams that automate their testing never see a return on their investment.

In a nutshell, the current test stack is complex, time consuming to build, and just doesn’t scale like you would want it to.

We want to change that by standardizing the fragmented test stack and coalescing it into an easy-to-use platform that combines the flexibility of open source test automation tools but with the ease of existing closed source low-code solutions.

Bringing standardization to a fragmented testing toolchain

We now know the problem lies with the lack of a common standard in the testing ecosystem. So how do we stop test automation from becoming a complex parallel development project? When we set out to build Testsigma we laid out 3 core principles the platform should achieve:

i. Unify a broken test stack
ii. Simplify the complete testing cycle, from test planning to design, all the way to development, execution, and analysis
iii. Make quality a shared responsibility by enabling non-programmers in the team to test

What we’re trying to do is not just simplify test automation but bring sustainable scalability that can help users and teams actually do more testing rather than being caught up with building and maintaining scripts and frameworks.

Building a unified testing ecosystem

To really solve for the broken test stack, we had to make sure our platform doesn’t limit users to specific use cases, programming languages, application types etc.

We decided to bring everything under one roof and built Testsigma as an open-source, low code platform that mimics what the modern Test automation workflow looks like.

Our platform works out-of-the-box. You don’t have to ‘set it up’ one framework, library, and tool at a time. You can simply install it and directly start automating tests for web apps, mobile apps, and APIs. This enables teams to shift focus towards scaling testing rather than maintaining the automation framework to support it.

From test development to reporting, users can perform integrated end-to-end testing that’s supplemented by powerful TestOps, built-in test data management and one-click integrations with delivery pipelines, for web apps, Android and iOS apps, and APIs, etc.

Effortless extensibility

We have seen that after teams automate a number of ‘standard’ tests, they struggle to scale because test scenarios increase in number and complexity while release cycles shortened. It’s no secret that test automation requirements are unique to every organization and constantly change based on the product & what stage it is at. Test automation requirements can start out small and then grow rapidly.

We wanted to make scalability and extensibility something that was accessible and easy.

Testsigma’s platform approach will enable everyone to easily add custom actions, data generators, reports, integrations etc. form a community powered marketplace and build all these as needed using a simple Testsigma SDK.

Also, we are an open source platform, you can dig deep and extend the core platform as you need.

No-code testing that’s not just record and playback

In cross-functional development teams, everyone including Devs, QAs, PMs are responsible for the quality of releases. To balance quality with release velocity, we see teams adopting shift-left continuous testing.

We built Testsigma as a platform that everyone in the team could use to plan, develop, execute, and analyze tests, but the traditional ‘record-and-playback’ approach to to test development left a lot of room for flakiness and browser compatibility issues to creep in.

To create tests in Testsigma all you need to know is simple English. You can either write tests step by step, or generate them by recording real-time user scenarios and interactions that are auto-converted into editable tests.

Why Open Source?

Our objective is to collaboratively build a future-ready test automation platform, an ‘operating system for software quality’ alongside its most important stakeholders – the user, that decisively bridges the gap between development and testing.

In our journey so far, we’ve noticed that there is a misalignment across quality, teams and tools. There isn’t a tool in the market that involves every quality stakeholder, technical or not, in the building and integration of a test automation framework within the SDLC. We think that by open sourcing our platform, we can bring SDETs, Test Engineers, and Test Automation architects on the same page as QAs, PMs, and SMEs.

Check out Testsigma GitHub repo!

We open sourced Testsigma to achieve a few goals:

i. With access to our source code, teams can dig into, customize and extend Testsigma as needed
ii. Makes it easy to integrate existing open-source technology stacks. This flexibility is often missing in closed-source testing tools
iii. Open-source is low risk because it doesn’t involve security constraints 3rd party cloud-based tools are restricted by
iv. We are aware of the immense complexity in test automation, and that every challenge cannot be solved by one team. Open source is a powerful enabler where the entire dev & testing community can collaborate towards the singular goal of simplifying test automation for everyone

We will of course continue to invest time and resources into improving both the open source and cloud version of our product but it’s the contribution of the community that will make Testsigma the universal standard in test automation.

Thank you! 🙏

Metrics in SDLC: Let the Truth Prevail

DEEPIKA K — Mon, 28 Feb 2022 06:04:38 +0000

Communication is the key to managing the stakeholders. Many times, not enough efforts are made to communicate clear details, status, risks on the ongoing projects. On the other hand, not everyone can detail every important aspect or gauge what’s important to communicate without being subjective and setting aside all emotions during communication.

Usually, Engineering teams are focused on their work and do not put a lot of emphasis on communication and highlighting the risks with all the data. Even when they do, the usual sentences will be ‘should be able to complete on time’, ‘too many bugs’, ‘not ready’, ‘looks good’ which are all subjective in nature and do not really convey the information that helps in making a decision.

Often there are assumptions that communication happened or that everyone knows all the details. This leads to management being in the dark on important aspects.

One way of ensuring smooth communication is to have proper data to represent the status and risks.

Metrics in SDLC

Metrics are pure data. They show you numbers without emotions which is the most important factor in analyzing the data. The real problem, in SDLC, starts when these metrics are considered as a single source of truth or when they are taken up as absolute measures or when used inappropriately.

A few notable points on metrics:

i. Metrics are indicators of current or past conditions–they are not THE truth. The proper initial response to any metric anomaly is to investigate, not act.

ii. The more a quantitative metric is visible and used to make important decisions, the more it will be gamed.

iii. Be careful what you measure because that is what you are going to get. You should measure things, but understand when to make them as targets.

iv. Vanity metrics makes you feel good, they cannot be used for decision making.

When and when not to use Metrics in SDLC

There are some metrics that are absolutely useful while there are others that are mostly misleading or distracting, more of a Vanity metrics or that can be easily gamed. In other words, not well thought of. Every Manager, every leader at some point goes through the process of picking a wrong metric, getting carried away with the same.

Always ask questions before you pick a metric:

i. Will they be gamed?
ii. Are we choosing Vanity metrics?
iii. Do we need to use this metric as a measure?
iv. Do we need to publish this metric?

Take for example – ‘Zero technical debt’ as a Metric – this means all bugs identified, during the SDLC, should be fixed and cannot be left in the backlog. If we start measuring teams on this metric, the whole focus will be on fixing every bug even if it’s from a feature that no customer has been using, even in cases when it’s impacting the new features and so the customer adoption.

There are a few metrics that we should watch silently, during the SDLC, to understand how the team is doing, to understand what needs to be improved in our process. If you upfront publish these metrics as measures, they will eventually be gamed.

It's time to fix test automation for good

DEEPIKA K — Wed, 12 Jan 2022 06:45:38 +0000

Test Automation as a process has existed since the early 1970s-1980s when diskettes and manuals were sold separately by companies. A key issue of testing software faced by users during that time was something that might ring familiar with Automation and QA teams today: Maintenance. It's incredible how an age old problem that existed with primitive automation software still haunts QA teams today.

Test Automation has come a long way since then and the efficiency of a well structured and defined framework can drastically reduce the effort required in QA. But to build such frameworks and systems around your code, that’s not just stable but also scalable with every build update is no easy task. It usually takes upto a year to start seeing real value in test automation projects -- when they are done right. But should we really wait that long?

Why test automation becomes a high effort parallel development project

Let's get to the 3 primary barriers teams have to overcome to build a fully automated testing framework:

1. Complexity:

“Test Automation is a development process, end of story.” - Anonymous
Before you start piecing together code that forms the foundation of your framework there are several important questions that need answering:

i. What language should I choose? (Python, javascript etc. usually dependent on what your product is built with)

ii. What combination of frameworks do I need? (for. Eg; Selenium + Junit OR BDD framework like Cucumber +TestNG)

iii. What exactly should we automate? Unit tests, Sanity or Smoke, Regressions?

These are just a few to begin with. If we keep going you’ll start having to look at Test data, Page Object Models, Build management etc.

As you can see, bringing all these elements together is no mean feat. It requires months of planning, development, not to mention you need the right team to help you build the entire thing.

2. Maintainability

You’re 6-8 months into your Test Automation journey. You’ve been able to automate 40-50% of test suites which is above average and a good speed of development. But then the dev team announces that there is going to be an extensive UI overhaul in your product.

To testing teams this means one thing, a boring, tedious maintenance effort that's going to slow the speed of your test coverage. Now this is obviously a worst case scenario.

But maintenance even since the early 1980s, still persists as the number one pain point for testers and automation teams alike. There are several reasons why maintenance is so hard:

i. Conducting impact analysis after code changes is arduous

ii. No easy solution to handling dynamic elements and selectors

iii. Test documentation is not upto speed for new software releases

iv. Traceability of affected tests is time consuming and difficult to get 100% right

3. Scalability

Once you have set everything up and sorted out your maintenance issues and reached a good level of testing cadence for your release cycles it’s time to scale. As your application continues to grow, your company is also launching a couple of new products

So just re-deploy your Test Automation .bat file for the new testing teams right? Well it's not that simple. It turns out, the new application is being built using Python instead of Java and your framework has been set up to support automated testing for Java based applications.

Did you know: Testsigma is completely codebase and Techstack agnostic? Its built-in APIs and drivers make adding integrations and extending automation a lot easier!

Scaling in test automation has always been difficult because it is hard to establish design patterns and standardize frameworks across teams in an organization.

With the variance in techstacks, skill level and experience, the Testing CoE (Center of Excellence) is often faced with dilemmas on how to replicate the success of one automation project across different teams.

Which leads us nicely into our next section:

Build vs buy? Why this question is harder than it looks

Traditionally there are two main approaches to implementing Test Automation. You either use a set of open-source frameworks and build your setup from scratch, OR you purchase a ready-made solution. But there are so many factors to consider and even after going through them all it's a difficult and sometimes irreversible decision.

Let's look at why this is so and what problems each approach creates.

Building a framework

i. Pressure on realizing ROI is high, therefore becomes a results-driven process

ii. Strategic planning of automation becomes short-sighted and has long-term stability effects

iii. Not enough skilled automation engineers to really carry out the implementation quick enough

iv. Testing deadlines are too short to wait for automation to develop and it results in more manual testing

v. Product quality is compromised in search of managing deadlines

Buying an automation tool

i. Upfront cost is inevitable but paid tools are a ready made solution

ii. The variance in testing scenarios means no tool can match your needs perfectly

iii. Paid tools are closed systems so there is no scope of extending or customizing the platform to your needs without the intervention of the vendor

iv. Eventually scaling becomes highly dependent on the roadmap of the product

Sounds familiar?

Bringing stability and standardization to Test Automation

The objective of testing has always been ensuring the delivery of bug-free, high performance products, services & applications. But testing teams are usually handcuffed when it comes to resources. The developer-tester ratio is a huge debate in modern engineering teams and budgets also differ based on company and team size.

So we have a problem.

i. On one hand, we have several tools and frameworks to choose from but a decision taken always leads to a compromise on either time or flexibility.

ii. On the other hand, we have teams with varying budgets and skill sets and a pressure to keep up with the speed of development.

So, what’s the solution to this long standing problem in Test Automation? Well, first there has to be a change in approach which involves

i. Setting realistic timelines and goals for your automation project

ii. Building a clear testing & automation strategy

iii. Involving not just QA teams but everyone else in the quality process

But this is just half the battle. It still does not account for the varying degree of capabilities current tools and frameworks in the market provide.

To bring real standardization to Test Automation, a framework needs to be both powerful and malleable. Here’s what a Test Automation system should ideally provide:

i. A framework should be simple to set up,, easy to use and reliable to scale

ii. A framework should be easy to adopt for both Automation and QA teams but should also enable them to keep up with the speed of development.

iii. A Framework should help teams shift left without compromising on technical & budgetary constraints.

iv. A Framework should enable end-to-end test automation and simplify how teams can extend it, to match the variety of test scenarios encountered.

We’re on a mission

At Testsigma, we’ve taken a completely new approach to Test Automation and built a platform from the ground up that brings together the best of both open-source and paid tools. Testsigma is a first of its kind Open-Source platform with an out-of-the-box framework.

i. A simpler set-up process that takes only a few minutes

ii. Integrated modules to manage tests, elements and data

iii. An Intuitive UI to navigate and organize everything

iv. Built-in drivers, SDKs and Test Runner for powerful, quick results

More importantly, Testsigma is a completely customizable platform. You can build utilities or install add-ons from our marketplace as your testing requirements evolve.

Our mission is to transform the way Test Automation is achieved by teams and companies worldwide. By eliminating the complexity in setting up, testing and scaling Test Automation but also adopting a team approach to testing, testing

For too long, QA has lagged behind development in terms of speed, focus and capability. It’s time we levelled the playing field and finally make significant strides to fixing Test Automation

How should enterprises execute cross-browser testing?

DEEPIKA K — Wed, 17 Nov 2021 05:50:46 +0000

As a small business or a startup, we often make decisions that can change the whole structure of our working processes. Honestly, this is not a bane that can bring the businesses down. Such businesses thrive on these decisions as they let them clearly decide what suits them best and why.

What’s better than finding it on their own by trying a mix of things? As for this post, it is a bit different from startups and small businesses. It talks about the future of these companies when they expand their operations to multiple locations and work on a very large scale – spanning over nationally or internationally. If startups are ready to face these changes, are enterprises such as Adidas too?

Throughout this post, we shall see how enterprises behave and what makes them an “enterprise”. We shall also see how decisions are made in an enterprise and why cross-browser testing is the most important thing in 2021 to sustain a healthy business.

What does enterprise mean from a tester’s POV?

In the summer of 2019, British Airways faced a technical issue on its website. They never revealed the problem, but whatever it was, it resulted in delaying of hundreds of British Airways flights, cancellations, and problems for thousands of passengers.

This is the impact of a small website issue on an enterprise and reminds us that even the slightest mistake is unaffordable.

An enterprise, like many small businesses, operates heavily with its official application. The application in general terms refers to an “enterprise application” because of the company associated with it. In addition to being associated with a big name, they are extremely complex and distributed in nature.

Complex, because they work on an extremely large scale with a lot of technologies and frameworks. Sometimes you will find that enterprises have designed their own frameworks to deal with their targetted goals and missions.

Another important aspect of an enterprise with respect to testers is its distributed architecture. Enterprises generally pan internationally to various countries and each user no matter where they are expect the website to load within 3 seconds.

Considering this requirement and the website load, enterprises generally set up multiple servers and machines that can talk to each other through a network.

Apart from these essential elements, there are other components as well that need to be considered in an enterprise application from a tester’s point of view. Throughout this post, we shall see the bits of these components and relate them to the testing scenario.

Needs of an enterprise

An enterprise is like an engine that requires a constant supply of fuel to run. These essential needs keep the enterprise upright in the market and help it keep running for a long time.

While some may argue that an enterprise runs on long-term planning, financial stabilities, core competencies, we shall only focus on the needs in terms of software (web application to be more precise).

Stable online presence

The first thing that strikes the mind of any reader is the stable online presence in the market. Internet presence today is more than necessary (if there is any such thing) in post covid times.

When the world was locked down inside their homes, the only thing that connected people with an enterprise is their website. The following graph depicts the change in percentage in Jan, Feb, and March 2020 with respect to these months a year back.

Source

Notice how March 2020 has shown an extremely positive change in website users with respect to March 2019. The thing is, enterprises adjusted themselves according to the situation and even if they did not have a service through the website, they started it.

These things will sustain now at least for the time being. Therefore, the most important need becomes to grow an online presence.

Accessible to everyone

Another important need of an enterprise is to be reachable to everyone. In pre-technology times, enterprises such as Walmart increased ease-of-access by opening a store not more than 4.2 miles away from you no matter where you are in the United States.

Today, being easily reachable has changed its meaning. Physical presence is now more related to geographical location (demanding geo-location testing) services and the online presence of everyone.

Though “everyone” is a vague word in this regard. Its meaning changes according to the audience an enterprise serves. For example, being readily available has led to a two-fold increase in active users for Microsoft Teams in the past year.

Source

This is a pure example of being easily and readily available to everyone. Such a product is just a couple of clicks away for the target audience. For a cross-browser tester, what this means is the number of active users a software can face at the same time.

In our example of Microsoft teams, testing has made it possible to get the user count from 75 million to 145 million. Consider a scenario, if the application crashes frequently in an important seminar or a college lecture. Using another application is just one email away in such cases.

Alternatives today such as Google Meet do not even require an installation hence there is no trouble in switching from A to B. If the application is not tested for such a scenario, whether it will be readily available to the users is just a guess.

Reputation

Warren Buffett once said, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.” Enterprises work on the same philosophy. Consider the same example of British Airways taken in the above section.

Had you been one of the passengers when the glitch occurred, would you ever want to book a flight next time even if you have to pay extra? I don’t think I would. This happens because the reputation is lost now. As a matter of fact, British Airways has been a prey of such things a couple more times.

As you see one application can bring down the reputation of an enterprise and result in millions of dollars in losses. You don’t need to do a corruption scheme or release a bad product.

You don’t even have to do bad product marketing. Just a small web app glitch is enough. Hence, it can be said that these things could be avoided with cross-browser testing regularly and efficiently.

Change in long-term

When it comes to long-term changes, two companies come to my mind specifically. The first one is Microsoft. Microsoft once had a market share of around 95% with their native browser internet explorer which was discontinued a few years back.

A lack of long-term planning made them stick to their own strategy rather than adopting as per W3C, users, and developers. The results are clearly visible.

The second company is Compaq. Compaq, as you might know, was bought by HP and they decided to discontinue the brand after a few years. Focusing on company acquisition and increasing their user base is said to be a long-term planning issue on which Compaq did not focus. Instead, they tried to outrun other brands quickly in the computer business.

All the changes happening with respect to technology depend on people and organizations constantly involved in developing newer tools and/or approaches.

These can be technology-related, design-related, new device-related, etc. The need for an enterprise is to adapt quickly to sustain its brand value.

Product range

The final need as per my understanding is to provide the same experience to the users across various platforms. For example, if I am an enterprise, I can look forward to designing a native application, a web application, other products such as smart speakers or assistants etc.

If we look at the large umbrella, this results in more connectivity with the user. If someone is more comfortable with an app or gaming console, we can adhere to their needs.

For testers, the main focus is the internal architecture used while designing the products. This includes the design principles, server communications or data transfers and storage. While these applications may look different to a user, they are connected at the back-end to provide a unified experience.

For example, I can log in to the website and app with the same credentials without creating a new account. Even my data is synced over to different platforms quickly which means I am working on the same database for each of my applications.

Cross-browser testing ensures that such interconnected features such as “Login” work correctly across the products using GUI over the web. For a rich experience across various platforms, cross-device testing becomes necessary as it points out hidden bugs that might be specific to a certain platform. Hence, a strong architecture quality is expected from the testers.

Cross-browser testing and Enterprises

Up until this point, you must have realized how important online presence has become for an enterprise. On top of it, the Covid-19 pandemic has made a lot of enterprises shift their focus to digital platforms rather than just stores and advertisements.

This raises a need to have a perfect web application that is acceptable to all the customers no matter what type. This is possible through cross-browser testing and this section is dedicated to its elements in detail – especially for enterprises.

Pre-requisites for cross-browser testing

The pre-requisites for cross-browser testing are quite straightforward – frankly speaking, they do remain the same for startups, SMEs and big enterprises.

Maybe I can pitch the same for a team of seven-ten members working on a web app. The only thing that changes is the scale of operations which in this case is very large.

A browser matrix

The browser matrix of an enterprise is the target device list they want their application to be rendered on. For smaller enterprises and people just starting the web application part, this is easier to create. But not so much for big enterprises and hence can be a little challenging.

Enterprises have existed in the market for a long time now. For such a long time, some people are always loyal to the enterprise who find their services/products extremely satisfying for the last n number of years. The problem sometimes arises at this point.

A few parts of the audience feel comfortable with the simplicity of previous technologies including internet explorer. Enterprises, trying hard to maintain their reputation always keep them in mind, and hence these browsers can be seen in their browser matrix for a long time.

Another important part of preparing the browser matrix for cross-browser testing, for enterprises, is the business perspective. For example, it may so happen that the average minimum spends at a location or from a particular browser or manufacturer is higher than others.

This makes them in the premium category. So even if they are fewer in number, they need to be included and tested for cross-browser compatibility.

A platform

The next logical part we need as a pre-requisite is a platform. A platform can be online, local, virtual machine, cloud-based setup, hybrid, anything. Since the size and complexity of an enterprise are extremely large, it is recommended to use automated cross-browser testing on an online cloud-based tool only.

The main disadvantage of using a platform is arranging the device and updating ourselves. Even if you have the funds, it will always be a tedious and time-consuming task. Secondly, manual cross-browser testing is a big NO when it comes to enterprises.

Lastly, cloud-based tools are optimum because they have their own infrastructure, resources, and every small tool that helps you speed up. It’s like one more part of your team that is just dedicated to developing the infrastructure and maintaining it constantly.

Source

Testers

The final pre-requisite is the testers. Testers may not mean professional testers but anyone who has a deep sound knowledge of the product and knows how to point out bugs in it.

As far as the coding part is concerned, you may need an automation tester if you have selenium-based grids, etc. But if you go for cloud-based automated cross-browser testing tools such as Testsigma, you can skip this part and construct test cases directly from day 1because it is completely codeless.

How should enterprises perform cross-browser testing?

The last section introduced the pre-requisites along with the enterprise effect on them. A browser matrix for an enterprise is influenced by many factors and so are the testing mechanisms.

Being an enterprise, in this section, we shall not consider money as a factor influencing the decisions on how should an enterprise move towards cross-browser testing.

Method for cross-browser testing

There are two methods for cross-browser testing – automated and manual. We shall not go into the details in this post. If you are interested to know in detail about them, you can visit the cross-browser testing guide.

For an enterprise, as I discussed above, manual testing is a big NO. There are two good reasons for this. First, manual cross-browser testing is just time-consuming for an enterprise that works on such a large browser matrix. You would never be able to compete in the market with your competitors.

The second reason is that enterprises just cannot afford mistakes and manual cross-browser testing is one thing that is prone to it. For an enterprise, the best method is to go for an automated cross-browser testing solution. This way things move faster and in parallel to reduce the time for release.

On-premise or Cloud?

The next question is, once we have decided that we will go with the automated cross-browser testing, should we develop our on-premise solution or cloud-based?

Now the thing here is that sometimes both may seem optimal for an enterprise. But the investments are significantly higher in the on-premise solutions.

Source

Developing an on-premise solution is not easy. For a perfect cross-browser testing environment, you should have all the devices at your end and you should keep adding newer ones as they are released. Another money-eating factor is the development and maintenance of these devices.

For an automated environment, you should have all the tools, frameworks, proficient testers, and connectivity all along. If one connection fails, you need to spend extra to repair it or in another sense maintain your whole infrastructure. Even if money is not a factor, going on-premise has time and space challenges that are best avoided.

A cloud-based service is different. It’s like a car rental company that can lend you their services, functional and ready-to-go in seconds. What car do you want, depends on your needs.

If you need a platform for 100 people with 10 parallel tests, you will pay different compared to those with unlimited projects and 25 parallel tests.

Platform – A most important aspect

The most important aspect of performing cross-browser testing is the platform. In the last section, I briefly introduced the importance of a platform but there is a lot more than that.

A platform is just not a medium to perform automated cross-browser testing but something that you should trust and completely rely on. If you are in luck and use the perfect tool for yourself, believe me, you will see the changes in the testing process very quickly.

Instead of elaborating on the features, an enterprise should look for an online cloud-based tool, I will demonstrate all those features taking examples from Testsigma. This is an online tool that can automate cross-browser tests on 2000+ browser combinations.

One of the most effective features of this tool is the ability to write automation tests in the English language. This increases the accessibility of test cases for all the teams related to a project.

Anyone irrespective of sound coding knowledge can understand and even construct new test cases. Multiple teams from different locations can also use this feature to quickly execute test cases.

Security

After the test creation simplicity, the next thing to worry about is the security part. While the security of the web application depends on the developers and security analysts, the cloud platform should also play its part to prevent any unauthenticated sign-ins.

Testsigma provides SSO (Single-Sign-On) facility for all the team members to prevent repeated signing in and maximizing security.

Real mobile devices

A platform with real devices at their end provides a rich analysis of the performance of your web application that is not possible on emulators and simulators.

For example, no emulator can simulate or predict accurately how network issues will play a part in the website loading. As an enterprise, I think real device testing is something that cannot be taken lightly.

If you can get an accurate analysis of actual devices, you can be sure that removing those bugs will smooth out the road after release.

Integrations

The next feature to look for in a cross-browser tool being an enterprise is the integrations it offers. The simple reason for this is to gather everything in a single place which can save a lot of time.

If you have some issue and log that into another platform, your testers would have to now keep track of two things simultaneously. This number always increases as the enterprise operations are quite large.

What if we could log this bug directly from within the platform? Platforms such as Testsigma provide a long list of integrations to suit your needs and help you reduce time in such operations.

Reporting Analysis

The final feature to look for in a platform is its reporting capabilities and how much will you fetch from reports. Reporting is somewhat similar to what pandas does in Python. An extremely rich reporting means you can analyze your testing with minimum effort.

With quality reports, not only testers, anyone can realize what 26% test case passed means or what the generated graph depicts for each environment.

Are you an enterprise? What do you use?

Enterprises work on complex, highly scaled, and distributed applications. In the past year, the shift towards digital platforms has made a web application one of the most important aspects of an enterprise. Something that connects to millions of users and helps it grow business.

Therefore, like any other business operating a web application, enterprises need cross-browser testing to perfect their product and make it bug-free.
In this post, we focussed on cross-browser testing for enterprises and the options in front of them to move ahead on this path.

If you are an enterprise looking forward to closing down your trust in cross-browser testing, this post will help you in that. While I admit that this post does not cover the analysis and in-depth complexities of “cross-browser testing” other posts will guide you in that topic quite well.

As for this post, the main focus has been the reflection of cross-browser testing on an enterprise’s operations and how those can be resolved. I hope this post will help your enterprise take wise decisions.

3 top tools for automated cross-browser testing

DEEPIKA K — Sat, 25 Sep 2021 06:04:11 +0000

The whole point of cross-browser testing is to deliver consistent user experiences across various browsers. When we build websites or web apps, some of their features aren’t compatible with some browsers; with cross-browser testing, we can ensure uniform experiences.

Picture source: Hostucan

While performing cross-browser testing, we generally check for the following:

i. Is the website/app responsive across multiple browsers?
Are there any UI inconsistencies?

ii. Are any specific browsers reporting code bugs?

iii. Is the website/app performing uniformly across various locations?

iv. Are all UI elements functioning?

v. Is the website slow or crashing?

vi. Are all form fields of dialog boxes functioning?

When we perform cross-browser compatibility testing, it’s easy to discover such bugs and fix them before our product goes into production.

Automated testing tools are what makes cross-browser testing effective. In this post, we’ll discuss the top three tools for automated cross-browser testing and their features. Before we proceed, we recommend reading: when should automation of cross-browser testing be done?

3 Top Tools for Automated Cross-browser Testing

1. Testsigma: Testsigma is a cloud-based automated testing tool that supports cross-browser testing. It hosts around 2,000 real devices and thousands of browser-OS combinations in its cloud and gives us the flexibility to create test suites for multiple browsers and versions.

This is a codeless testing tool maintained by AI, which means we can write our test cases in plain English and AI translates it into code. This tool aims at making test creation and maintenance very easy by the uniqueness of the test creation strategy it offers.

Convenient for both beginners and experts — Testsigma allows prioritizing and scheduling tests, which means our tests can run all round the clock and without much human interference. It also supports visual testing to ensure our websites or apps deliver pixel-perfect UI without any changes across the browsers.

Picture source: Testsigma

Features

i. Automate for web, mobile, and APIs from the same place: The same test case creation strategy(in simple English) lets you automate your web tests, mobile tests and APIs easily from the same place.

ii. Simple Scenarios: Automate using codeless approach via simple English

iii. Complex Scenarios: Automate using a codeless approach via simple English and for customization, JAVA and Selenium can be used too.

iv. Parallel test execution: Testsigma lets us accelerate our testing with parallel test executions in multiple platforms.

v. Bug management: It generates screenshots, logs, and comprehensive videos of bugs and crashes and reports them through exhaustive reports via email, Slack, Teams, etc. Besides, AI auto-heals at least 70% of error-prone areas or patterns.

vi. Shift-left: We can adopt the shift-left testing approach and start testing our website/app right from the design phase without much knowledge of the app/site.

vii. Set-up: Zero set-ups are required. We can sign up and start using their tools from day one.

viii. CI/CD integrations

ix. Geo-location testing: We can configure geo-location on a real device or GPS to perform geolocation-based testing.

x. Customizable Reports and analytics dashboard: Testsigma has a highly customizable reports and analytics dashboard that offers insights into test efficiency and team productivity and suggests how to improve these aspects. It also tells us how our tests are performing in several test environments.

xi. Remote accessibility

xii. 24×7 support

Price: It begins at $249 monthly when billed annually;

Also, you can read more about Testsigma here: When to use Testsigma as a cross-browser testing solution for your organization?

2. SauceLabs: Trusted and used by many industries — Sauce Labs is one of the top tools for automated cross-browser testing. It is a low-code testing platform that lets us write our tests in simple English, and the platform’s AI capability translates it into code.

However, do note that this is limited to uncomplicated test scenarios only, and if your testing involves complex or advanced scenarios, you should be comfortable with programming. Sauce Labs comes equipped with over 2,000 Android and iOS mobile devices, and it also lets us connect emulators and simulators for testing.

It also allows testing our apps or sites from behind the firewall without configuring VPN. Besides, it manages and delivers browsers to the cloud within 48 hours of a release.

Picture source: Sauce Labs

Features

i. Simple Scenarios: Automate using a codeless approach via plain English.

ii. Complex Scenarios: Automate via Selenium, Espresso, Appium, XCUItest, Cypress, TestCafe, Playwright, and Puppeteer.

iii. Parallel test execution: We can set up parallel test execution to run our tests simultaneously on Sauce Labs’ cloud. The tool also states that we can accelerate our test run time by up to 10x.

iv. Bug management: Sauce Labs comes with an extended debugging feature that generates browser console logs, screenshots. It also shares Selenium log files and metadata for developers to debug efficiently.

v. Shift-left: It supports the Shift-left testing approach and allows us to begin testing from the design phase.

vi. Set-up: No additional downloads or configurations are required. We can simply create an account with Sauce Labs and connect our tests with their browser cloud.

vii. CI/CD integrations

viii. Geo-location testing: With Sauce Connect Proxy, we can perform both manual and automated testing of geo-locations.

ix. Reports and analytics: With Sauce Labs, we can generate extensive performance and analytics reports on our test efficiency. Also, even before the app or site goes live, we can gather front-end user experience feedback with this tool. It’s not customizable but comes with several plug-ins.

x. Remote accessibility

xi. Email support

Price: When billed annually, it’s around $199/month. This plan gives access to the real device cloud and only one parallel test. The cost rises if you prefer more parallel test executions. However, Sauce Labs offers its tool at no cost for open-source projects.

3. Perfecto: Perfecto is a cloud-based automated testing tool that supports cross-browser testing. Enabled with AI, this tool comes with hundreds of real devices with various browser and OS combinations.

This testing tool is equipped with AI, and it’s capable of generating Selenium test scripts when you record your test actions via its record and playback tool.

With this tool, we can perform a combination of automated tests and interactive live tests to measure how our website or app is performing when it comes in contact with an end-user. It also allows testing right from the starting stages of development.

Picture source: Perfecto

Features

i. Simple Scenarios: Automate using a codeless approach via record and playback.

ii. Complex Scenarios: Automate via Cypress.

iii. Parallel test execution: We can execute tests in parallel in various platforms and environments.

iv. Bug management: Bug reports and crashes are reported via logs and screenshots; Perfecto sends recommendations for bug fixes too.

v. Shift-left: It supports the shift-left testing approach, and allows testing from the earlier stages of development.

vi. Set-up: Simply sign up and start accessing the device cloud and the tool without any additional downloads.

vii. CI/CD integrations

viii. Geo-location testing: Perfecto allows us to test from various locations against factors such as geofencing, time zones, etc.

ix. Customizable reports and analytics dashboard: Perfecto’s customizable reports and analytics dashboard fetches full test reports, heatmaps, etc. It also sends detailed reports after every run.

x. Remote accessibility

xi. Form support

Price: It starts at $125/month, and offers only basic features. However, if you are looking for no-code automation, they customize the pricing accordingly; you can contact Perfecto for a quote.

At a glance, let’s observe the features these three tools offer:

Now that we’ve discussed the best-automated testing tools for cross-browser testing, do let us know which one caught your interest and why in the comments section below.

In case you’d be interested to know about more tools for cross-browser testing, check the exhaustive list here: An exhaustive list of the most popular cross-browser testing tools

Automate cross-browser testing: What you need to know

DEEPIKA K — Fri, 24 Sep 2021 10:55:41 +0000

A good browser, good apps, a good camera, and fast networking in your smartphone are just expected today. – Thorsten Heins

This quote shows the dependency we have on browsers, the web, and mobile phones today. But how did we come so far? Technological development and robust testing have helped us reach where we are.

When it is about multiple devices and browsers – the role of cross-browser testing can not be under-estimated.

What is cross-browser testing?

Cross-browser testing helps us to make sure that the below features are working perfectly for the product across multiples browsers:

i. Responsiveness
ii. Functionality
iii. UI and design
iv. Quality

It ensures that the website or web application works seamlessly on various combinations of devices, browsers, and operating systems as below:

i. Devices – Mobile, laptop, desktop, tablet, smart TV, etc.

ii. Browsers – Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, Edge, UC Browser, Opera, etc.

iii. Operating systems – Windows, Android, iOS, macOS, etc.

Cross-browser testing helps provide a perfect user experience to the user by ensuring that the performance, UI, functionality, and compatibility of a website or web application are as expected on various devices, browsers, and OS combinations. Therefore, it provides good test coverage on thousands of cross-browser combinations involved.

Find the complete cross-browser testing guide here.

When should cross-browser testing be automated?

1. When the same test case is being executed on different device combinations multiple times

When the same test cases are executed multiple times on different devices, OS, browser combinations – this means that the same tasks are being done repetitively. These are the types of test cases that are ideal for test automation.

The only one-time effort would be spent on automating the test case and then the est execution time would be saved in every cycle. Of course, you also need to figure out if the feature is stable for test automation and how many times would you need this to be executed in the long run.

Let’s try to understand this with an example – there is a travel itinerary booking application. It has a user registration module for the user. The corresponding test case checks that the user is entering a valid email id and an ‘activate user’ link is sent to that email.

If the above test case is executed manually the same registration form will have to be checked on all devices, OS, and browser combinations – this would come to around a thousand test cases, can we execute it manually? Simply no.

When automated, the same test case is executed multiple times without any human error and repetitive effort. Manually achieving this is impossible. But through automation, we can do it and that too quickly.

2. When the test suite for cross-browser testing is large

When your test suite for cross-browser testing has a large number of test cases, it will take a huge time for test execution and when the same tests are executed on multiple combinations – the time taken will increase exponentially.

If these test cases are executed repeatedly and the features they test are fairly stable then the test cases for cross-browser testing should be automated to save time and effort.

Let’s try to understand this scenario with an example – a personal banking application has many modules- transfers, deposits, loans, cards, account statements, etc.

It is a big application and has a thousand functional test cases. Additionally, it has a gigantic regression test suite.
Consider a thousand environments on which we need to run these test cases. Through manual testing, 100% of test coverage can never be achieved.
However, through automation testing tests can be executed parallelly on multiple devices. Therefore, the testing time will be reduced considerably.
Tests can be scheduled to run 24×7 and this helps in completing the testing activities quickly.

3. Your customers are reporting browser-specific or device-specific issues

When there are customer issues on a specific browser or device. This means the cross-browser testing has not covered all the required scenarios. If you have a stable product and have frequent releases, then you should think about automating your cross-browser tests and increasing your test coverage.

Let’s try to understand this with an example, consider a job portal that is launched for both mobile and web – Job applicants are reporting an issue that they are not able to attach resumes on mobile using the safari browser.

Additionally, there are multiple issues on iOS, which are getting reported too. This means that the cross-browser testing has not covered the iOS and related browsers. It is a miss from the testing side and an example of poor coverage.

This would have been avoided if the cross-browser testing was automated. Proper user analysis and browser selection on that basis help in such scenarios.

4. When automating your cross-browser testing ensures a better ROI

Automation ROI % = ((Income from automation – Investments on automation) / Investments on automation)* 100

If time, human effort, and money are saved after switching to automation as compared to before the automation scenario. Then, it is evident that cross-browser test automation will bring better ROI than manual testing.

Cross-browser testing scenarios that are best to be automated are mentioned here in detail.

Get started with test automation in minutes.

When should cross-browser testing not be automated?

The general rule of test automation applies to cross-browser testing as well, we should avoid automation of cross-browser testing in the below scenarios:

1. When your application is not stable and the UI identifiers keep changing

When an application is unstable, we will get different results every time the tests are run. In such scenarios, test automation is not recommended.

Because, we will lose time, effort, cost in setting up the test scripts. However, the returns will be nothing, since the results are inconsistent and the test script will require a lot of maintenance.

To understand this, let’s take the example of the job portal further – On the job portal, there are options to take tests. But the application is unstable, the UI path identifiers keep changing due to development changes.

Automation scripts are created for these unstable identifiers but the tests, when executed – sometimes pass and sometimes fail. Thus, the automated tests are not helpful in reaching a conclusion about the quality of the application.

2. When functional requirements are changing frequently

If the test requirements are changing frequently, then having a stable test automation framework in place is difficult.

Let’s try to understand this with an example – consider an e-commerce website, where the return policy, refund policy, etc. are not baselined. In such cases, on what basis the test scripts will be written? Even if the scripts are written, they will be likely to change again. This will cause rework and wastage of time, effort, money.

In such a scenario, cross-browser test automation is not preferred.

3. UI and usability extensive testing where human interaction is required

If the usability and user interface are to be tested through cross-browser testing, it is not advised to automate it. Because both of these require the human eye for detail and intelligence.

For example, consider a gaming application, which is high on GUI and user interaction.

If we automate it, the usability, intuitiveness, ease of use, can never be tested.
These scenarios require an actual human to test these features on different browsers, devices, and OS combinations.

4. Yours is a short-term project

If the project that you are working on is short-term – spending time and effort on automation is not advised because you might not achieve anything in terms of ROI by automation. By the time your tests are stable and test scripts are no longer failing, your project might be nearing the end.

Let’s try to understand this with an example – a website needs to be upgraded for sending newsletters, e-book download, adding user subscriptions, and forum for users. Once, these functionalities are added, there is no need for improvisation or further development.

It is a short term project, however, the registration form, e-book link, forum, and subscription for newsletter form, all should work on all browsers. Therefore, these newly added functionalities need to be tested.

In this scenario, the automation of the test scripts will take months to be fully functional and error-free. This is a bad example to go for cross-browser test automation because the project is short-term.

What stage should this be executed?

Generally, there is no rule as to when you should start the execution of cross-browser testing.

We can have it started anywhere in the SDLC.

1. Early in the SDLC

If there are only one or two screens or pages ready, you can start testing them for cross-browser compatibility. This will give early insights and the area of improvement, which can be incorporated in the next development tasks.

2. Development is complete

Starting when the whole application is ready is also doable. However, when cross-browser testing will be performed there will be defects and code changes. This approach is going to be more costly than the first one, where we were testing early in the development cycle.

3. Post-release in market

There can be a situation when a product is released in the market without running cross-browser testing on it. And then based on customer feedback and data analysis the cross-browser testing is done and issues are fixed.

But as we can clearly see, this is a risky approach where we can lose valuable customers and their trust.

Read these 9 tips to avoid cross-browser compatibility issues.

Recommended tools according to needs

The most popular cross-browser automation testing tools are:

1. Testsigma – AI, NLP, cloud-based, codeless platform with 2000+ devices and multiple test lab access. Makes test creation and test maintenance very easy.

2. Lambdatest– Cloud for cross-browser testing – live and automated – with 2000+ devices.

3. Browserstack– Cloud for cross-browser testing – live and automated – with 2000+ devices.

4. CrossBrowserTesting (by SmartBear)- Cloud-based cross-browser testing lab that hosts 2050+ real browsers and devices.

5. SauceLabs– Cloud-based testing platform that allows continuous testing, automated, live cross-browser testing on the cloud.

Every tool has its own capability and support. Analyze the testing requirements and choose the most feasible tools based on needs and budget.

A comparison of these tools is here in the below table:

Find an exhaustive list of popular cross-browser testing tools here.

Conclusion

One thing’s for sure is that cross-browser testing is not only for browsers. It takes into account the thousands of devices, OS versions as well. If done manually, it will take aeons of time and also the test coverage is going to be really bad. Bad coverage and insufficient testing lead to unhappy customers and no one wants to enter this vicious cycle.

Automation of cross-browser testing is a way out of it. Find your perfect testing tool which reduces the chaos around cross-browser testing and let the testing team get a breather.

Testsigma is such a tool that lets you automate your cross-browser tests on thousands of device and browser combinations with just a few clicks. Select your devices and start testing right away! No coding required, just pay and use. Check here, to see how simple it is.

5 signs you need to choose cross browser testing on the cloud

DEEPIKA K — Tue, 21 Sep 2021 05:52:01 +0000

Only people who are living under the rock aren’t using mobile phones for their daily activities. Well, this means we all rely on our phones for things such as booking tickets, consuming multimedia content, or even ordering groceries and medicine.

On average, most of us read, interact, engage and learn from the widely available resources like websites, mobile apps, etc. If we talk about just websites or web apps alone — Siteefy reports there are around 1,216,435,462 websites globally as of July 2021.

The same study states that about 10,500 websites go live every hour. As we speak, hundreds of new websites are being created. You get the drift — websites and web apps are as coveted as mobile apps.

PC: Meme Maker

Now, let’s discuss the essential facts — as of August 2021, the global browser market share report by StatCounter states that around 64.92% consume content via Google Chrome, followed by Safari at 18.43%. Another study on browser version market share by StatCounter shows that older browsers such as Chrome 85.0 and 86.0 are still in use.

We can observe that Samsung Internet 14.2 and Edge 92 are used by 2.03% to 3.36% of the world population. People access our website or app on different browsers and various devices. To ensure our site performs uniformly across multiple browsers, we perform cross-browser testing.

As the name suggests, cross-browser testing is a testing approach that ensures our website/app performs as intended across various devices and browser-OS combinations. It helps us validate the UI of our software.

PC: StatCounter

Usually, one of the most discussed possibilities while performing cross-browser testing is if we should move to a cloud-based testing tool. When we embrace the cloud, we perform end-to-end testing on the cloud itself.

It means we test, analyze, collaborate, and manage bugs from within the cloud. Cloud-based tools come with plenty of integrations, browsers, and real devices in their ecosystem that helps us accelerate our testing.

In this article, we’ll discuss 5 signs which mean that you should move to cross-browser testing on the cloud. Also, a related read that you might want to check out: when should you automate cross-browser testing?

5 Signs You Need to Choose Cross-Browser Testing on the Cloud

So, here’s the thing — we can either automate or perform manual testing to check out cross-browser compatibility. Let’s see the signs that we need to shift cross-browser testing to the cloud in manual and automated testing scenarios.

When should you move to the cloud for manual testing?

When you need to start cross-browser testing without delays of setting up or configuring

Configuring the environment is usually time-consuming because we need to maintain, upgrade, and update thousands of versions of browsers or real devices. Especially for running every test. However, when we move to the cloud, we can start testing quickly.

Cloud-based testing tools require no additional setup or configuration; they manage the testing environments, browsers, and device labs. Traditional tools demand a lot of time to get used to; with cloud-based tools, we can get familiar with the tool in less than a week. It’s best to go for a tool that handles training and onboarding so we can quickly learn.

PC: Testsigma

For instance, Testsigma, an automated cross-browser testing tool, doesn’t require any time for set-up. We can sign up and start using their tools from day one. Besides, it comes with comprehensive training and a knowledge base that helps in learning the tool.

When you need to start cross-browser testing without much investment in terms of cost

PC: Money vector created by pch.vector – www.freepik.com

It’s a known fact that if we setup all the infrastructure needed for cross-browser testing, we would need to invest in the maintenance and up-gradation of both old and new browsers as well.

With a cloud-based testing tool, we can eliminate this hassle. We can pick a cloud-based tool after factoring in our budgets, but it’s important to note that there is a higher ROI with cloud-based tools. Also, we pay for what we use, which makes it worth our effort.

Based on the project requirement, we can choose a testing tool that offers all the features we need to get started. Most cloud-based tools come with browsers and devices in their clouds; some tools even offer the earliest versions of Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome.

When you want to pay only for the time you actually do the tests

PC: Money vector created by pch.vector – www.freepik.com

One of the biggest concerns with a traditional setup is that we still pay for its maintenance and infrastructure even when they’re not in use. Cloud-based tools offer a great solution to avoid excess costs.

A cloud is scalable, and we only have to pay for the time and features we use. Depending on our project requirement, we can scale up or down as cloud tools follow the pay-as-you-use or pay-per-usage concept, making them quite cost-effective.

Here is an exhaustive list of tools that can be used for cross-browser testing along with their salient features.

When should you move to the cloud for automated testing?
Cross-browser testing has become essential today but sometimes it has to be automated to get optimum results. Below we mention a couple of signs when you should automate your cross-browser testing.

When performing cross-browser testing is very time-consuming

PC: Calendar vector created by pikisuperstar – www.freepik.com

If it’s taking very long for our testers to perform cross-browser testing, thereby delaying our timelines and deliveries — it’s time to embrace the cloud. Cloud-based tools are designed for teams with agile and DevOps cultures, and these tools offer speed by expediting testing in several ways.

For instance, most cloud-based tools support reusing common test steps or shared functionalities across multiple browsers; we can effectively reduce the time and effort for test creation for multiple browsers.

When you also want to exercise the advantage of parallel test execution

For comprehensive cross-browser testing of our software, it’s vital to test it across various permutations and combinations of browsers and OS. If we’re running hundreds of tests, even though we’re automating, it can be time-consuming.

However, we can execute our tests in parallel in multiple environments with a cloud-based tool, thereby expediting our testing. Also, if we have to perform regression tests, we can automate them on the cloud. This ensures our testers focus their time on more important tasks rather than testing the same cases repeatedly.

Final words

By now, it’s clear that performing cross-browser testing on the cloud is beneficial, offers high ROI, and helps accelerate testing. With Testsigma, you can take your websites/apps to the next level. It’s a scriptless testing tool that comes with thousands of real devices and browsers for you to start testing right away.

It supports parallel test executions and CI/CD integrations. Besides, it allows testing apps on your actual devices locally with several browser-version configurations that Testsigma maintains for you.

PC: Testsigma

Here are more reasons why to choose Testsigma as your cross-browser testing solution

Most Popular Tools For Cloud Automation Testing

DEEPIKA K — Fri, 10 Sep 2021 08:21:07 +0000

Cloud-based technologies are on a rise today. Even if I deviate a bit from core IT fundamentals, the pandemic of 2021 made cloud tech a hero. It taught us how just an easy monthly subscription can give us access to thousands of movies, games, and live events such as the Tokyo Olympics via streaming.

This is just a small example that we all can relate to and understand the cloud. In IT, however, the cloud means a lot more than just streaming media on the system. If I consider current times, it has become a core concept in development, management, analytics, and also – automation testing.

Cloud-based automation testing is a simple concept. We leverage cloud resources to accomplish our automation testing goals in the project. In this article, we will focus on tools that make this happen in real-time on the cloud.

Below, I have summarised the most popular tools for cloud automation testing with the assumption that you all are familiar with cloud-based automation testing. If not, it is recommended to go through this post first.

Testsigma

Testsigma’s first landing page commitment says it is “a completely cloud-based test automation platform”. It comes with a lot of modules creating a testing ecosystem aiming towards creating a single solution for multiple testing requirements. From end-to-end to AI-based test automation, Testsigma can prove to be a good friend for your organization.

Key Features

i. Role management system: Testsigma provides multiple role management systems whereby different people can be assigned various roles and permissions to influence the test scripts.

ii. Varied automation processes: Testsigma’s main USP is that it can automate almost anything on the cloud – web app testing, cross-browser testing, native Android & iOS app testing, and web services testing.

iii. Dynamic locator strategy: Cloud automation testing in Testsigma comes with a dynamic locator strategy that helps in creating stable and reliable test cases.

iv. Parallel Execution: Testsigma comes with parallel execution capabilities to help test faster. You can also run these parallel tests in the local devices or integrate them with other cloud solutions such as Browserstack and SauceLabs.

v. Real devices: When testing, testing on real devices is always recommended when compared to testing on emulators and simulators. And thus, Testsigma offers integration with real device cloud labs.

vi. In-depth reporting: Testsigma’s reports are of extremely high quality and have been appreciated for the analytical information displayed in them. It helps in getting a comprehensive study of the quality of tests.

vii. CI support: Testsigma also comes with continuous integration support with integrations with CI tools to facilitate your automation testing.

Apart from these highlighted features, Testsigma comes with a lot more interesting and powerful features that can make your cloud automation testing an easy task. You can read all their offerings on the official features page.

Pricing

$249 (Basic pack per month)
$349 (Pro pack per month)
Custom

AppPerfect

AppPerfect is one among the tools list that is a versatile tool – it is of great use for not only testers but developers and big data operations. Integrating salesforce capabilities, AppPerfect sells web testing, load testing, and security testing on its cloud menu.

Apart from cloud testing, you can also download various other testing modules on the system. AppPerfect provides free 1-hour assistance to install and familiarize with the product.

Key Features

i. GUI enabled: AppPerfect cloud automation testing has a smooth GUI rather than being controlled through a console. GUI gives an added advantage of ease-of-use and does not need you to remember complex console commands.

ii. Ready-made scripts: In case you don’t want to write scripts yourselves, AppPerfect provides a solution for you. AppPerfect gives the facility of defining the test requirement and bring scripts to you.

iii. Distributed Testing: AppPerfect cloud automation testing solution provides distributed testing where the testers can run their test scripts on multiple systems connected through the cloud. The report is then gathered at a single place with a detailed analysis for the team.

iv.Schedule and Run: AppPerfect provides the testers with the functionality to schedule their test scripts to run at a specified time. This is very helpful in cases where you either need to verify the performance at some time or need to schedule a nightly test run.

Apart from these, AppPerfect brings a few more advantages such as record and replay feature, remote test management, and in-depth report generation. You can visit their website to know more.

Pricing

$399 (Starter Pack)
$499 (Starter Pack + Annual technical support)

CloudQA

CloudQA is one among the cloud-based automation testing tools that is growing in popularity. It can perform tests on web applications and mobile applications. CloudQA is made exclusively for performing QA tests with features such as codeless testing and extension recording.

Key Features

i. Intelligent maintenance: CloudQA provides intelligent test script management with facilities to simplify complex tasks easily with Javascript.

ii. Extremely versatile: CloudQA cloud automation testing solution requires no setup, no infrastructure, and no lock-in. You just need to integrate your tech stack quickly and get started.

iii. Parallel and scalable: CloudQA provides features to scale your automation tests easily and run parallel executions connected to the cloud infra.

iv. Collaborative in nature: The tool provides collaborative features where multiple people from the team can collaborate from the ease of their location and contribute to the test creation.

v. High-quality resource: CloudQA offers real devices, popular integrations, and data-driven testing support for automation testers.

vi. Testing methods: CloudQA provides functional testing and load testing capabilities on the cloud along with other features.

Pricing

$299 (Basic pack per month)
$499 (Standard pack per month)
Custom

Blazemeter

Blazemeter brands itself as a “complete automation solution” and according to its reviews, it has lived up to its reputation. Blazemeter is a versatile tool with continuous testing, end-to-end testing, functional testing, and API testing.

As per Blazemeter, it has been named “Gartner’s customer choice for software test automation”. It boasts the following key features.

Key Features

i. Access configurational control: Blazemeter comes with an access control facility where automation tests can be modified only by the authorized people.

ii. Record tests: Blazemeter can record the tests performed by the tester.

iii. Ease of integration: The tool can be integrated very easily into the existing pipeline.

iv. Continuous integration abilities: Blazemeter can be integrated with continuous integration applications to run automation tests at build phases.

Apart from the above points, Blazemeter can also be used for cross-browser support and fetching detailed reports.

Pricing

Free (limited functions)
$99 (Basic per month)
$499 (Pro per month)

AWS Device Farm

In our list of most popular cloud automation testing tools – the last one is AWS Device Farm (for mobile sites and mobile apps). It was developed in Portland and acquired by cloud service provider AWS in 2015.

AWS Device Farm’s (previously called AppThwack) selling point has always been its array of real Android and iOS devices which can run automated tests and provide accurate real-time analysis. Since the devices are real, you can get a hint of your application’s performance in the market beforehand.

Key Features

i. Real devices: As mentioned above, AWS Device Farm comes with real devices running your application. With real devices in testing, you get the best idea about the behaviour of a mobile application on target devices.

ii. Deep-reports: Device farm has always focussed on letting its user know the power of the final generated reports. These reports are high-level with detailed logs, screenshots, and performance data.

iii. Built-in testing frameworks: AWS device farm comes with built-in framework support for your help in cloud automation testing. These include Appium and Espresso.

iv. CI support: The tool also comes with continuous integration support with integrations with CI tools to facilitate your automation testing.

AWS Device Farm is a great platform that comes with physical devices that numbers up to 2500. As a tester, you can always keep this on your list for cloud automation testing on mobile applications.

Pricing

$0.17 (per device per minute)
$250 (unlimited testing)

And there are more…

This ends our carefully curated list of the most popular cloud automation testing tools. But, obviously, these are not the only ones floating in the market. With experience and keeping our broad audience in mind, we have shortlisted these tools.

However, we would love to learn more from our readers and understand what other leaves exist in this tree. Share your thoughts and experiences with other tools that were not included in the list.

This will help the community and gain a better understanding of this beautiful cloud automation testing arena.

Automated integration testing - what features help?

DEEPIKA K — Wed, 08 Sep 2021 10:32:47 +0000

What is Integration testing?

Integration testing refers to a type of software testing where individual software modules are combined and tested as a ‘group’.

The main purpose to carry out integration testing is to uncover the defects/bugs in the interaction between these software modules when they are integrated/combined.

Each module as shown in the above figure, if tested individually is referred to as unit testing. When these modules are combined, then the testing done together on this group is referred to as integration testing.

In short, integration testing focuses on the interactions between components or systems.

Introduction to Automated Integration testing

Just moving ahead towards the automated integration testing. But before we move further, let me tell you a little about automation testing which you must already be aware of.

Automation testing in simple words is performing and executing software testing activities (which were previously done by humans) with the help of automation tools or frameworks.
Generally, integration testing does not require any specific tools.

The QA team often runs integration tests manually. Usually, it is carried out with the development parallelly.
Still, we can automate the integration testing process which requires a tool to do the work.

Numerous automation tools are available in the market to carry out the process of integration testing.

The automation tool used for integration testing should have the below features:

i. The tool should be able to automate different types of user actions

By definition, integration testing means the testing done when multiple different components of an application are integrated. In essence, it also means that different types of user actions would be executed on these different components.

Thus, it is imperative that the tool you choose for automation of your integration testing should support the automation of the different types of user actions you want to automate.

ii. The tool should support automating different types of modules

During integration testing - different types of modules are integrated and then tested. For conducting this testing successfully via automation, the test automation tool should support test execution on all integrated components.

iii. The tool should allow customization if there is a custom module

During integration testing - when different modules are integrated for testing, there could be modules that might not need custom code. The tool you choose should allow you to add custom test steps where needed with ease.

iv. The test automation tool should let you drive your integration testing with all the different types of data that you need to test it with.

Data-driven testing can be the most important aspect of your integration testing. Because one of the main aims of doing integration testing is to test that the different interfaces are able to process all types of possible data that can be provided as input and give the expected output every time.

When collecting all the types of data, the datasets could become huge. Thus, the test automation tool should support testing with huge sets of data easily.

v. The tool should allow easy test case creation and maintenance to allow for easy edits

Now that the intrinsic aspects of integration testing have been discussed, now is the time to talk about test automation aspects. When you are about to automate, you would benefit from automating with a tool that also makes your test case creation and maintenance easy.

This means it should be easy to create test cases, easy to edit the test cases, and easy to debug in case the test cases fail.

Testsigma is one such tool that comes with all the above features and lets you automate your test cases in simple English on the web, mobile, and APIs. It also has built-in features that let you maintain your test cases easily like selfheal, automatic detection of affected resources after a change.

Another tool that would help you do efficient integration testing on browsers is Selenium - an open-source tool that supports multiple programming languages like - Python, Ruby, Java, C#.

vi. The tool should save time where possible with features like parallel test execution, reusable test steps, end-to-end test automation support.

When you start automating tests, you will observe that there are certain steps that are quite repetitive. A good practice is making these steps reusable by just creating them once and using them whenever required.

Another feature that can help you save tonnes of time is support for parallel test execution. When test cases are executed in parallel, that means multiple independent tests are run at one time. Thus, the time they would have taken to execute sequentially is reduced.

When looking for a test automation tool, you should look out for such features that are specially created to help you save time. Saving time also translates to saving money.

Conclusion

Integration testing is an important type of testing that should be executed once component or unit testing is completed.

When looking for automating these test cases, above were some features that your tool should have for you to achieve success with automated integration testing. Do let us know in the comments if you’d like to add more points to this list.