Automation Testing: Improve the Quality & Efficiency of Software

By Harikrishna Miriyala

Testing is an important part of software development. Every software development team tests its products, but software most times has defects. Test engineers strive to find them before the product release, but the defects often reappear, even with the best manual testing process. Test automation is the best way to increase the efficiency, effectiveness and coverage of your software testing.

Companies face challenges in adopting automation tools for their testing. It is mainly due to high investment cost for the tool and difficulty in selecting the best automation framework.

SPAN’s Test Automation Accelerator helps clients to overcome these challenges and speed up the automation of its functional and regression testing. The robust framework enables early automation, which helps to develop test scripts during the design and development phases of the software development life cycle (SDLC).

SPAN has strong capabilities of conducting end-to-end test automation for applications built in multiple technologies. It supports different test tools like HP Quick Test Professional and Win Runner, IBM Rational Functional Tester, Test Partner and Borland Silk Test, VSTS Coded UI and Telerik Test Studio & Testing framework, in addition to open source tools such as Selenium. It allows for frequent releases of applications by reducing maintenance efforts without compromising on the quality of testing.

Key Features and Benefits:

• Early automation: After confirmation of test requirements, test automation can be conducted concurrently with the preparation of manual test cases. 
• Pre-built libraries: Reduces the cost of developing an automation test suite by up to 30%. They enable creation of automated scripts after documenting the logical flow of test cases. 
• Offline automation: Less investment in test tool licenses by limiting the need for test tool licenses to the test execution phase. Licenses are required only during test execution and creation of the object repository for the application under test (AUT). 
• Reusable components: Automated test cases based on the design of the business processes result in higher reuse of scripts. 
• Faster time to market and increased ROI: Gives competitive advantage and enables routing of cost savings to other IT and business initiatives. 
• Automation methodology: Reduces cost by enabling business users and manual testers to develop automated test scripts by using a pre-defined framework. 

Having seen the benefits, the importance of automation testing will be increasingly realized across varied domains to accelerate processes. "Automation Framework" would find superior importance and acceptance in the industry. If an organization intends to draw the benefits of automation as promised by tool vendors, it needs to explore the tool as a complement to manual testing. It also means implementing a sturdy test methodology and training the testing team regarding the detailed sketches of the selected tool in a unique development environment of an organization.