Testers in companies usually face a wide range of tasks that require different testing approaches. As a rule, functional testing is most in demand, that is, determining the ability of software in specific conditions to solve problems that users need. In such work, testers have to constantly repeat a large amount of routine operations, which takes a lot of time, often much more than the testing department staff have.
The obvious way out here is to automate the testing process. There are many tools for it, and the feasibility of its implementation is determined by the financial payback of the solution, which primarily depends on the capabilities provided to the tester, on how quickly one or another case can be automated, what level of skills is needed for this, and how expensive this will be. support automation. Of course, automated testing has not only advantages, but also limitations.
To make a choice towards automation, you need to understand its pros and cons.
The advantages that automation gives the tester:
- The human factor is reduced to almost zero - the script cannot confuse anything or run an irrelevant test.
- Testing speed - automation allows you to run several times more tests in a comparable time.
- Streamline Test Scripts Effort — Maintaining existing scripts during automation is much less time-consuming than running the same script repeatedly by hand.
- Flexible execution time - you can test at any convenient time, not just during business.
However, automation has a number of disadvantages, such as:
- If the software under test is frequently modified, this will require constant costs to keep the scripts up to date.
- Initially, high costs for the development of automated tests, making it impractical to automate "one-time" tasks.
- The cost of automation software platforms can be quite high, and free tools usually have more modest functionality, fewer out-of-the-box features and less usability.
What to Consider Before Automating Testing?
- How well the automation tool recognizes the controls in the application that it needs to work with is especially true for, for example, mobile applications or fat clients, especially those written on older platforms such as Delphi. If the elements are not recognized, then you need to find a plugin or a corresponding module. If you cannot reliably work with the application you want to automate testing, the tool is not for you.
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RPA
Business process automation (RPA) is developing intensively and, due to the similarity of business tasks and approaches, can be useful in test and development automation. While the global coverage of automated testing is no more than 30% on average, the use of flexible and simple tools such as RPA can help raise it to acceptable levels (it is believed that a good percentage of coverage for test automation is 60-70% ).
Frequent changes in the application ecosystem
We have already mentioned among the systemic drawbacks of automatic testing the frequent changes in the products with which you need to work. Unfortunately, this problem has not yet been resolved by vendors, and if your testing environment is constantly changing, this will seriously limit the possibilities for its automation.
Modern solutions such as UiPath RPA allow part of this problem to be solved through the use of “smart” capture of UI elements, which understands that the appearance of the application or the structure can, within certain limits, change; and an object repository that allows you to centrally manage the taxonomy of UI elements.
Lack of business knowledge
If specialists do not know the functionality of the systems they automate and do not understand the business processes themselves, then as a result their test cases may not be relevant to the business problem being solved. A situation may occur when testers test something, and the real use cases of the product are left aside or only basic cases are covered.
The synergy with RPA helps a lot here because robots tend to dive deeply into business processes. Using the experience gained from automating business processes allows you to create really working and useful tests.
Lack of test data and environments
This is a big problem: in order to make a good test, you need to have real data. In turn, this requires working with a living system in which nothing can be changed. It is impossible to buy goods worth 100 thousand in an existing electronic store, since all statistics will be lost. Theoretically, a tester should have a double test store with the same data to work, but, unfortunately, it is very difficult to implement this and, often, prohibitively expensive. For banking systems, this problem is even more relevant and there is even less real test data in this area.
The question is very acute. The Test Suite has functionality for working with generated test data, which, of course, does not solve the problem, but partially eliminates, for example, due to the ability to flexibly configure test scripts in order to parameterize them to run in different environments.
Availability of user friendly automation tools
A test automation tool should be flexible and easy to learn, this lowers the barrier to entry and allows more employees to create tests. The UiPath platform is user friendly and has an online academy, forum, telegram community in Russia, etc. allows you to learn quickly. Mastering the UiPath toolkit to the level required to create good cases is much easier than learning hardcore things like Selenium. At the same time, for those who already confidently own such tools, learning UiPath will not be difficult.
There is a need in the market today for a tool that would make it easier for testers and automation engineers to deal with the aforementioned gaps. The Test Suite is designed to make testing and testing automation intuitive and easy to maintain, so that companies do not have high costs.
Test Suite benefits
One tool for RPA and test automation
The UiPath platform is multifunctional, combining the capabilities of robotization and test automation. This allows the sharing of automation artifacts generated across the organization. In addition, within the test space, the platform is able to integrate and work with more than 190 technologies, which greatly facilitates its implementation.
Replacement of outdated systems with modern ones
In any large ecosystem of an enterprise or organization, there are many different applications operating. It is quite common for applications released in 90 and 2020, websites on different engines, and mobile applications on different technologies to work side by side. The problem with the systems zoo when testing is that a certain tool is suitable for testing one or three applications, but not all at once. There are applications that test websites well and don't know how to work with a fat client at all. Test Suite allows you to create a unified ecosystem and effectively test software of different categories and versions. In Test Suite, you can test your mobile app and web resources at the same time without switching between many different windows.
Minimum programming knowledge
The tester should be testing the system, not worrying about coding. With the help of the Test Suite, he gets a universal testing tool - he can solve all the tasks that he has in one tool with a single methodology and a single approach, without going into implementation details.
Enterprise-grade orchestration
With UiPath, you can test live, production software, not necessarily in a test loop. For this, the same technologies are used as for the robotization of real business processes.
The Test Suite integrates well with CI / CD, it has ready-made connectors for most of the major issue tracking platforms, plugins for Jira and SAP Solution Manager.
Ease of creation and maintenance
The UiPath test solution not only demonstrates ease of use, but also reduces maintenance costs. Several UiPath customers have already reported doubling their test coverage with the Test Suite.
With all the advantages of test automation using the Test Suite, you need to understand that a tool cannot completely replace a person, but it will certainly help make the tester's work easier and more useful.