Technology is driving change in almost every major Industry and, the IT industry is not left out. Natural Language Processing(NLP) and Artificial Intelligence(AI) are a few advancements in this area. All day-to-day tasks in every field are being evaluated every moment to see how they can be better “automated” to reduce running cost.
Another aspect that is being worked upon is the human-friendliness that can be made possible with the tools. The software industry started with Assembly Level coding languages that were completely machine compatible but humans needed special skills just to decode them. We then worked our way to High-Level languages where the keywords we use are close to natural language.
The software industry has multiple roles to take up to develop and deploy quality software. A major part of that is software testing. Where the testing of the software developed by developers is done to make sure it works as expected and all major bugs are caught before the product is released.
Again, software testing can be done manually or can be automated.
Until now, the biggest challenge for a manual tester is the programming expertise required to shift to Automated Testing. There is no doubt that the Manual tester knows the product well. They know about each crevice and corner of the product they have been testing but it could be a bit of a struggle to automate complex test cases having to code. That is why we have people who specialize in automated testing, Automation Testers or Software Development Engineer in Test (SDETs) now.
Of course in the ideal world, if a feature has been automated thoroughly once, there isn’t a need to execute those test cases again manually as they would be automated and run every time a build would be created.
The truth though, is that after manual testing is completed, the test cases that are automated are a small portion of them to make sure that the major functionalities are covered. And that is a compromise we make to keep the automation costs in check.
With enough automation in place, there would be time to do some exploratory testing which would provide quick feedback.
Manual testing quickly becomes tedious for the tester when you perform regression testing. Verifying that every functionality works in every browser/OS combinations is not an easy job.
When you need to meet tight timelines and the product undergoes constant changes, Automated Testing would be the best bet but making this transition would require serious time and effort.
However, with Scriptless Automated Testing tools, this isn’t the case.
With Scriptless Test Automation, the coding/scripting hassle faced by manual testers is solved. Where test cases can be written in simple English, the manual testers have all the chance to make sure that all the test cases that matter are covered. And the automation testers can make sure that these test cases run as intended every single time.
Automating the manual test cases as received from the manual testers require some time considering the complications involved in coding and that single approach does not work on all test cases.
Refer this guide to read more about the Scriptless Test Automation.
At present, the day to day activities of an Automation Tester includes:
- Maintenance of created test cases. Making sure they run after every check-in and every failure is handled.
- Integration of the automated test cases with the reporting, analytics and CI/CD tool so that the test run results are known to the concerned people and any major hiccup is averted before the website reaches the customers.
- Figuring out the infrastructure needed for execution of automated test cases and reporting and analysing them.
At this point in time, a few tools like Testsigma provide end to end services to reduce the overall cost like integration with reporting, analytics and CI/CD tools and this just takes the burden of the automation testers off from all the mundane jobs. That is not all, Testsigma also offers a dedeicated cloud space for hosting the test cases.
Along with integration services with scriptless test automation, the offering is enticing.
Some automation testers may look at it as loss of work for them but, is it? When the test cases are AI driven and have the capability to auto-correct to work with new changes, most of the work is already taken care of. But, mapping of the elements and the actions in complex scenarios need to be supervised. The test cases that can work without any code are the simpler test cases but If the requirement is unique or out of the box, you might need some custom coding to fit your needs.
Even though maintenance is again supposed to be AI driven, not all automated cases are straight forward as is known to all the automation testers who have spent multiple days figuring out minute issues that make the test cases fail. As every website and processes are different, the approaches that work with them are different too. In Testsigma terms, an Automation tester can verify the affected test cases identified by the AI.
Along with the maintenance of these test cases, automation testers can now take their skills further to doing unit testing and white box testing and help debug the bugs. When the front-end work for the automation tester can be done by manual testers and most of the maintenance can be handled by the AI-driven testing tools, the bug-discovery is quick too. The automation testers can then focus on the resolution of these bugs.
When there are large products that need testing on multiple platforms before they can be sent for production, QA is required to align their efforts in the DevOps cycle and automation testers who have already been involved in managing the infrastructure for automated testing can help.
AI Driven test cases on the cloud should be a welcome change because it is only when people are able to get mundane tasks out of their way that they get the opportunity to take up more challenging tasks.
There are multiple scriptless test automation tools that are available and can be chosen according to your need. You may refer the guide, Scriptless Test Automation for Agile and DevOps and read the Top 10 features every Scriptless Automation Testing Tool must have.
Try Testsigma Now for Free to see how Testsigma takes care of your tests end to end with less intervention and more supervision from your part!
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