Double Your Productivity With Test Automation

As agility dominates the liveliness in the world, it is much important for software testing activity to clutch with towering productivity to be in pace with current developments. Traditionally accustomed testing practices not only take toll on profit & productivity, but also lead to failure of test automation project which will be identified only after a year or two. Hence, a contemporary approach in line with recent technological advancement is believed to speed up the time to the market by increasing productivity.

The reliability and performance of any developed software is stamped only after successful evaluation against the demands and  requirements from the end-users and the corresponding system specifications. Nowadays, we can observe almost all software organizations are working in a competitive environment and they are functioning effectively to grab possible opportunities with their phenomenal performance.

Then, How To Make Our Presence Addressable In The Market

The success of any software product after development process depends on 2 major factors

1. Quality of the launched product

Software quality can be achieved by evaluating the developed software through software testing process, which helps to detect defects / errors in the product so that appropriate solutions can be worked on to improve the functionality of the product.

2. Availability of the product in the market at the right time

If your product arrives late to the market, you will have less buyers and hence will be forced to match your strength with other sellers who have already established their foundation. Though your product has better quality, it cannot stand the competition as the demand starts rolling down gradually by this time.

As discussed , exceptional quality coupled with timely availability of the product in the global market increases the visibility of the product among large volume of users. This can be achieved by the making your team members to put out their services at a more rapid rate than before, which is nothing but,” Increased Productivity” or as mentioned in the topic “Double the Productivity”.

HOW TO INCREASE THE PRODUCTIVITY IN SOFTWARE TESTING

Test automation can help in enhancing the productivity of the tests by facilitating the testers to execute more tests in less time. Though the test organizations avail decade long experience and satisfies all necessary mandates required for successful test automation, at times, they fail to deliver in time due to some factors that revolves around the testing tool like , the tools’ ability to comply with the project requirements, the knowledge of the resources in line with the tool and the support and services from the tool end.

TIPS TO CHOOSE THE RIGHT TOOL FOR YOUR PROJECT

Usually, test organizations will keep on working out for new testing solution for giving best outcome than the previous one. In most cases, test managers in the decision making role will never support any change in terms of tool or technology fearing cost and restructuring. Finally, instead of selecting the right tool that will work smoothly with the technology on which the application is built, they end up with recruiting resources who possesses expertise with the existing tool and the technology or go for open source tools.

To establish productivity, testing team needs sophisticated tools and technology for test planning, designing and execution. A better software testing tool can contribute beyond expectation in terms of quality and productivity. It can increase the efficacy of the whole team thereby taking care of the time and cost .

There are many tools available in the market which adheres with different project requirements and technology. While deciding on the testing tools for a project, it is mandatory to check for the ability of the tool to adapt to the testing process followed by the organization. Hence, it is utmost important to check the following steps before deciding a tool

Step 1: The Adaptability Of The Tool With The Project

Every testing tool has some limitations, which may lead to some unknown problem: to avoid this take a detail look of these pointers below  to decide on the tool that works best with the existing skillset and accommodates the work process and technology .

• Understand the basic project requirements completely
• Keep the existing tool in mind and compare the ease of the new tool in line with its adherence to the new application and technology,
• Check the new tool for its functionality, efficiency and usage
• Make sure that the tool is easy to use and its learning curve is very less.
• Figure out the flexibility to configure
• Run a small POC of your test cases with the tool
• Calibrate its adherence to your budget.

Step 2: The Availability Of Crucial Inbuilt Features

Testing tools have varied features that can address the challenges the team is trying to solve. Hence it is best to look for those features that works best to solve the running issue.

• It should have inbuilt library, data table and proper project structure
• Capacity to automatically generate Object repository with unique paths
• The tool should be able to generate the scripts with minimal effort
• Allow Parameterization of the test to make it reusable.
• Create tests, plans, suite and test-set on its own
• Schedular and parallel execution a must

Step 3: Reporting Capabilities Without User Interaction

In most of the tools, lack of centralization leads the reporting process to be dependent on manual interactions ending up with unseen errors. Progress of the project has to be updated properly to avoid failure towards the end moment.

A testing tool with,

• Inbuilt Report generators (should allow custom reporting)
• Emailing reports
• Ultimate efficacy to generate reports in different formats

will provide automatic real-time reports that will facilitate the process of updating the clients regularly with the latest development and breakthrough of the project during every stage.

Step 4: Integration With Application Lifecycle Management

Nowadays, Testing being the fundamental necessity for a noteworthy software, initiating testing practices to locate defects earlier in the life cycle ensures best quality. Under such instances, a testing tool that can integrate testing with other tools from various phases of the lifecycle can open way to achieve Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) without much effort.

Version Control

• Ability to support available version control tools (including the top ranked ) in the market
• Highly flexible to integrate and work

CI/CD

• Ability to support available CI tools (including the top ranked ) in the market
• Adjustable to integrate and use the command line syntax available for the tool
• Process should be simpler to execute the tests.

If all the above discussed features are inbuilt in the tool finalised for a testing project, then automatically the productivity increases exponentially.

SKILLSET OF RESOURCES

The next Key factor that adds to the productivity of the tests is the skill set of the tester to communicate and respond to the queries raised by the client clearly and concisely with result oriented solutions. Resources picked up for any new project

• Should get trained on the tool decided for the project (usage, features and its limitations)
• Necessitate self-driven learning attitude to learn and advance ahead with new technologies
• Need to possess leadership quality to build an efficient team and work together in longer run.
• Require experience in handling various complex projects, so that it helps them to identify critical problems quickly.

SUPPORT AND SERVICE

Another key factor is tool support and related services, which helps to analyse and apply the tool in right context, so that it saves time, costs and streamline the skill set of resources to establish test productivity rapidly .

• The support team of the decided tool should be easily accessible
• Quick Resolution to the issues raised by the working team
• Precise communication with data and to the point between the user and service provider reduces the turn around time