Automated tests: With the growing complexity of software, there has been an increased demand for efficient testing approaches that can deliver reliable and effective results. It is why many enterprises are shifting to automation testing, as it offers faster test execution, improved test coverage, and reduced time to delivery in the market.
It is evident from the latest study by Global Market Insights, which predicts that the automation testing market is projected to witness over 15% CAGR between 2023-2032.
The most important part of automation testing is writing test scripts. Testers need to create test cases that can be executed using an automation testing framework to validate the functionality, usability, and performance of the software.
Yet, the biggest challenge QA teams face is writing good test cases. If your tests are flaky, they are practically ineffective, as they do more harm than good. They slow down the overall software development cycle with inadequate test coverage, poor bug detection, and misleading test results.
If you want to avoid this from happening to you, read this blog till the end and get to know the five best features of a good automated test so you can create well-defined test cases to improve testing quality and deliver software that meets the user’s expectations.
5 Points to consider while authoring automated tests
Good automated tests are indispensable assets for any software testing project. Here are the top five features you should take care of while creating an automated test case:
1. Simple and Easy
Automated tests must have a single objective as they are easy to write, understand, and maintain. Each test case must have 10-12 steps, excluding the clean-up steps. With this, you can effectively verify one condition per automated tests and create separate methods for different conditions.
On the other hand, if you incorporate multiple testing objectives into a test, it isn’t easy to comprehend and is time-consuming when it comes to designing.
These automated tests will most likely break during the process or give misleading results by showing false negatives or positives. It will make it difficult to ascertain the cause of failure as it involves multiple complex steps.
2.Reusable
A good automated test is designed by considering the reusability of test cases in the future. It means that the test cases could be used across multiple platforms and automated tests scenarios without the need to create them again from the start.
The test case should be able to adapt to evolving system requirements. But this is only possible when the test cases are built to be configurable. When testers code steps, it should take values from a single configurable file that has one global variable rather than having multiple hard-coded values.
This will allow enterprises to seamlessly integrate new functionalities into the existing test suites while enabling efficient automated tests maintenance. This will also promote consistency and standardization in the testing process.
Read more : Guide on iOS Automated UI Testing
3. Maintainable
The next feature to look for in any good automated test case is its maintainability. It refers to the ease with which test cases can be updated, maintained, or modified over time. For any application under test, the changes in it will impact the test cases.
As a result, it would be crucial to make the required modifications in the test cases. Your test cases can be maintainable if you decide what needs to be tested and how it should be tested.
The next step is to document the test cases to ensure you know the preconditions for the automated tests, execution steps, and expected results. Finally, all the test cases must comply with the coding standards and be controlled in a version control system.
4. Reliable
When conducting testing, your test cases must provide consistent and accurate results every time they are executed. It should not show false positives and false negatives and detect bugs efficiently.
Moreover, the test cases should be robust to handle unexpected situations and have built-in mechanisms to recover from them. To understand this better, consider an application under test that crashes. A good automated testing should wait a while and then terminate the indefinite wait time.
If you want to achieve reliability in your test cases, it is important to have a well-designed test that can be thoroughly validated through test data. This will help identify any issues arising during the development phase and correct them on time before releasing the software.
5. Independent
Each test case should be designed to be independent of each other. These tests do not depend on the outcomes of the preceding test. This will ensure that these tests can be started separately even if the previous tests have failed.
There are three rules to follow while creating an automated test case. First, the data corruption in one test case should not impact another. Second, the failure of one test should not cause failure of subsequent test cases. Finally, the state in which a test case leaves an environment should not affect the following test cases.
Moreover, independent test cases allow parallel execution so that test cases can be executed simultaneously in any desired order. All-in-all, this allows faster feedback on app performance and facilitates troubleshooting.
Final Thoughts
In summary, writing a good automated test is considered the fundamental aspect of software testing as it enables the creation of reusable tests that can be executed automatically later.
When you embrace these features of a good automated test, you can enjoy advantages like cost and time efficiency, accelerated development cycles, improved testing efforts, and better integration with CI/CD tools.
To ease your efforts, let us introduce you to one of the leading platforms, TestGrid. The platform is trusted by both enterprises and SMEs for their end-to-end testing needs. Using this AI-powered end-to-end testing platform, you can automate test cases using simple keywords to deliver high-quality applications on time.
This blog is Originally Published at TestGrid