The Basics of Automated Testing - 1

Test automation is the use of Software to control the execution of tests, the comparison of actual outcomes to predicted outcomes, the setting up of test preconditions, and other test control and test reporting functions. Over the past few years, tools that help programmers quickly create applications with graphical user interfaces have dramatically improved programmer productivity.


This has increased the pressure on testers, who are often perceived as bottlenecks to the delivery of software products. Testers are being asked to test more and more code in less and less time. Test automation is one way to do this, as manual testing is time consuming.


As and when different versions of a software are released, the new features will have to be tested manually time and again. But, now there are tools available that help the testers in the automation of the GUI which reduce the test time as well as the cost, other test automation tools support execution of performance tests.


Many test automation tools provide record and playback features that allow users to record interactively user actions and replay it back any number of times, comparing actual results to those expected.


Test Automation is an important subject since it's the most important part of any tester’s job. It's clearly not the best use of time to click on the same button looking for the same dialog box(expected result) every single day. Part of smart testing is delegating those kinds of tasks away so we can spend time on harder problems. And computers are a great place to delegate repetitive work.


That's really what automated testing is about. We try to get computers to do our job for us. One of the ways a tester describes his goal is to put himself out of a job - meaning that automate the entire job. This is, of course, unachievable so we don't worry about losing our jobs. But it's a good vision!


Our short term goal should always be to automate the parts of our job we find most annoying with the selfish idea of not having to do annoying stuff any more!!!


With people new to automated testing, that's always how we frame it. Start small, pick an easy task that you have to do all the time. Then figure out how to have a computer do it for you. This has a great effect on your work since after you get rid of the first one that will free up more of your time to automate more and more annoying, repetitive tasks. Now with all this time you can go and focus on testing more interesting parts of your software.


That last paragraph makes it sound like writing automated tests is easy, when in fact it's typically quite hard!!!


There are some fundamentally hard problems in this space. There are a lot of test tools which try to help out with these problems in different ways. Hopefully it will be valuable as a way to better understand automated testing and as a way to help choose your test tools. As a side note, implementing automated tests for a text based or API based system is really pretty easy; Let us focus on a full UI application - which is where the interesting issues are.


Automated test can be broken into two big pieces:
· Running the automated tests.
· Validating the results.


... to be continued