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3 Methods for Hands-free Continuous Testing

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In order to strike the perfect balance between speed and quality, teams that hope to achieve Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery must also implement Continuous Testing.

This is often easier said than done. It’s virtually impossible to have your team running tests at every moment — they do have lives outside of work after all, and it can be difficult to put dinner on the table while running a Selenium script at the same time. So how do you run your scripts, even if you aren’t at your desk?

Fortunately, there are various hands-free options for continuous testing that you can implement, which will keep tests running for you while you eat, sleep, or maybe even get some exploratory testing done.

Why Continuous Testing

What’s the point of continuous testing? There are a few major advantages that will enable you to achieve more in your day-to-day.

  • Test while you sleep – With continuous testing, you can literally test in your sleep. By setting tests to run overnight, you can experience the luxury of coming in the next morning to have your test results waiting for you and knowing with a glance whether they passed. Just ask America’s Test Kitchen about how convenient it is.
  • Keep up with Agile, DevOps and CI/CD – When software development teams are constantly integrating, you need a testing strategy to ensure those new features, fixes, and changes are put through the quality process, no matter how frequently they’re implemented. Continuous Testing is the only way QA teams can keep up with constantly changing features, frequent integrations, and fast workflows.
  • Catch bugs in each regression – When there are constantly small changes to an application’s code, it can break something that was previously functioning. And you don’t want your customers to be the one to catch it. Continuous Testing will help you be first to spot new bugs, so you can quickly debug and release to users with confidence.
  • Level up your automation game – Automate your automation with continuous testing, and set your tests to run as often as you need. Then come back to test results or screenshots that tell you exactly what you need to know about the health of your applications. Plus, testing in parallel allows you to further accelerate Continous Testing to increase browser coverage without compromising runtime.

Continuous Testing With a CI Server

Selenium WebDriver has long provided teams with the ability to automate tests across browsers. But in order to run those tests continuously, a Continuous Integration tool such as Jenkins, VS Team Services, Buildbot, Bamboo, CircleCI, TravisCI, Codeship, or TeamCity is needed.

By far, the most popular option is Jenkins, an open source automation server written in Java. In fact, according to the SmartBear 2018 State of Testing Survey, 66 percent of participants choose Jenkins to be their CI server. For development teams adopting Agile and DevOps workflows, Jenkins is a reliable tool for continuous integration and delivery.

But what about testing teams that want to leverage Jenkins for Continuous Testing with Selenium? The CrossBrowserTesting integration with Jenkins lets you run automated functional tests with Selenium, Appium, and visual screenshot tests, which means that every time you run your build process, you can simultaneously run your testing suite across thousands of browsers.

This is ideal for teams that already work with Selenium and a CI tool for deployment to start testing on a continuous basis. While Jenkins tends to be the most popular choice for CI and automated test scheduling, CrossBrowserTesting also integrates with TeamCity and VS Team Services, so no matter what tools you’re already using, it’s easy to integrate CrossBrowserTesting into your current workflow.

Continuous Testing With a Record and Playback Tool

For teams that may be less familiar with Selenium but still wish to automate, a record and playback tool might be a more practical option.

Record & Replay enables teams to achieve automation across browsers, just like they would with Selenium, without requiring knowledge of scripting and frameworks. This has provided teams with a more accessible option for less technical team members, or those who are just getting started with automation, to create automated tests. As tools like Selenium IDE and its alternatives are brought back into the spotlight, these options are becoming more and more attractive to modern testing teams.

But where record and playback tools will normally only run the test once to check if the test passes, how can testers implement Continuous Testing?

With new Scheduling in CrossBrowserTesting, you can schedule a Record & Replay suite to run as often as you need them. For organizations that have less technical testers, this allows you to achieve continuous testing without requiring the skills to run Selenium and Jenkins or another automation server.

Continuous Screenshot Testing

Teams that solely focus on functional testing without incorporating visual testing will be disappointed when all their tests pass and users are still pointing out visual bugs.

When visual elements can change from browser to browser or device to device and make the user’s experience difficult or impossible while still functioning correctly, it’s important to run compare screenshots in regression. Comparing these pages side by side and with their historical versions means you can be more aware of changes that break the application in order to debug before they reach the end user.

While you could always run automated screenshots in CrossBrowserTesting, it required a manual motion to rerun those tests on a certain cadence. You can now set those screenshot tests to run with the new Scheduling feature, just like you can with Record & Replay.

Continuous Testing for Every Team

No matter what tools you’re already using, what technical level you’re at, or how far your team is in their test automation journey, there are options to help every team achieve continuous testing in CrossBrowserTesting.

With options to schedule tests with Selenium, Record & Replay, and automated screenshots, you can take your automation to the next level and receive test results through email or Slack on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis that you decide.

Introducing Scheduling for Record & Replay and Automated Screenshots

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This year, we introduced Record & Replay for teams that want to automate tests without scripting. This method of codeless automation has allowed teams to maximize the value of every manual test by reducing execution time while increasing speed and coverage. And just like with Selenium testing, once your tests are recorded in Record and Replay, you can run them in parallel to get even more out of each suite.

Additionally, when paired with automated screenshots, teams of any skill level have the ability to visually and functionally verify their web application on thousands of browsers at once. By leveraging our Comparison Engine, you can take visual testing to the next level by evaluating differences that are highlighted at the pixel level.

Now with Scheduling for Record & Replay and automated screenshots, you can set tests to run on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis and have the results sent to you via email or Slack. Scheduling is the next step in helping our customers achieve continuous testing without needing to learn highly technical CI tools like Jenkins, TeamCity, and VS Team Services.

If you’re thinking this sounds too good to be true, find out how easy it is to get started with Scheduling in CrossBrowserTesting and see for yourself.

How to Get Started With Automated Test Scheduling

For Record and Replay:

  1. Go to Replay a Suite under Record & Replay in the CrossBrowserTesting app
  2. Select one of your suites. Note: You need a previously saved suite in order to schedule a Record & Replay test. Follow these directions to find out how to create a Record & Replay suite.
  3. Scroll down to “Suite Schedules” and click “Add Schedule”
  4. Decide if you want to run the suite on a daily, weekly, or monthly schedule and set a time for it to run. Choose if you want notifications via email or Slack and select “Add Schedule”

For Automated Screenshots:

  1. Go to View Test Results under Screenshots in the CrossBrowserTesting
  2. Select which screenshot test you’d to schedule and click “Test Results”. Note: You need to have previously run a screenshot test in order to schedule one. Follow these directions for how to take an automated screenshot of your website.
  3. Click “Add Schedule” and set to run daily, weekly, or monthly at a time of your choosing. Select whether you want notifications through email or Slack and click “Add Schedule”

That’s it — just a few steps to functionally and visually testing your UI on a continuous basis with no code.

If you want to learn more about Scheduling for Record & Replay and automated screenshots, join us in our upcoming webinar to learn just how easy it is to start scheduling your tests today. We’ll run through the new feature and give example use cases of Scheduling that you can immediately start implementing in your workflow.

We’ll also go through CI with Jenkins to further our pursuit of continuous testing in CrossBrowserTetsing for teams that may be interested in Selenium automation.

Register for the webinar now.

Next Steps for Teams Who Want to Move to Agile Project Management

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It seems that the companies we all aspire to be more like are moving quicker and releasing faster than ever before. So, how can the rest of us strive to follow in the footsteps of software giants that release innovative software on the hour? While there may be no single, clearly-defined answer, we do know that many are seeing success with agile project management and development methods.

By focusing on feedback from stakeholders throughout the development process, not only is agile found to be a faster development method, it’s also more effective in the way that it allows and encourages changing requirements.

However, as waterfall is the traditional methodology for software development, teams that are stuck in their old ways might find the transition to agile hard to wrap their head around, so here are 7 tips for teams who want to take the next steps and move to agile project management.

  1. Identify what or who is missing to make agile work. In order to move to agile, you first have to recognize that it will be process your entire team will have to get on board with and fully embrace in order to make it work. Identify the roles and people you need on your team to make a successful transition. It might be helpful to onboard a project manager, scrum master, or agile coach to help adjust the current workflow. Look at your current team, as well, to understand where there are silos and barriers to communication. Teams that don’t communicate will find it hard to be successful. Agile project management works best when this is cross-departmental collaboration, so it’s important to work from the inside out.
  2. Prepare to shift left. Agile will require more testing earlier in the software development lifecycle. Because each phase of the SDLC is done in short iterations, rather than long incremental ones like with waterfall, testing shouldn’t wait until the end when new features are fully developed. With a focus on continuous integration and continuous delivery that comes with agile development, continuous testing will be the key to fast feedback and iterative changes that are needed to release high-quality software. Evaluate whether you will need to introduce test automation, additional QA team members, new tools, or something else to help you reach maximum test coverage.
  3. Poke holes in what you’re doing now. Look at your current planning process, and outline how your strategy will have to change in agile development to allow for more feedback and flexibility. Where are the bottlenecks in your current process, and what prevents your team from delivering high-quality software or meeting short deadlines? This will be crucial to shifting to a new way of thinking and transforming your team’s workflow. Familiarize yourself with the different agile methodologies such as Scrum, Kanban, and Extreme Programming. While these all follow agile principles, they achieve it in different ways. Based on the makeup of your team and the objectives you discussed, it will affect the way you carry out agile project management.
  4. Get on board with sprints and standup. No matter which methodology you choose, a few things will probably be the same, and they’ll help you properly implement agile project management in your organization if you take the time to do them correctly. Sprints will be the duration of you planning — usually they’re two weeks long but can be anywhere from one to four — and standups are where you talk about what you’ll be doing in each sprint. Take advantage of these opportunities for strategic planning and collaboration with the entire team.
  5. Backlog issues and tasks. Identify the projects that currently challenge your team and what you’d like prioritize when you transition to agile. Create a backlog of tasks, gaps, objectives that need to be addressed so you can start ranking them on most to least important and having conversations about future goals. Discuss what is needed from each team member, how it will be accomplished, and what information is currently needed to make it as “done”. Once you begin to organize your team and the work that needs to be done, you can start building out detailed tasks and sprints.
  6. Don’t skip your retrospective. As you adjust to agile and the many changes that come along, you’ll be constantly learning about what’s working well and what isn’t, as well as what individuals are successful with and what they’re struggling with. Ensure that everyone has an equal say in each sprint, so it’s not just leaders and managers giving their two centrs. Focus on how you can improve in each sprint. However, don’t just wait until retrospectives to collect feedback from your team — encourage communication and checkins throguhout the sprint.
  7. Be open to change. Requirements change, tasks get de-prioritized, clients and customers change their mind, and feedback will alter the sprint process. The nice thing about agile project management is that it encourages these adjustments. Embrace agile and understand that these frequent changes are improvements that will help your team achieve continuous integration, testing, and delivery. If you feel like you’re getting lost or confused, always resort back to the agile manifesto to realign your team with the principles behind agile.

Finding your groove with agile won’t happen overnight, but there are certain steps your team can take to make the transition more seamless. For more, take a hint from what agile teams can learn from Netflix.

 

Upcoming Webinar: Achieving Quality Without a Dedicated Test Team

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As teams shift left, adopt new methodologies, and take on new testing strategies, the role of software developer v.s. testers is becoming more blurred. In fact, many modern software teams no longer work according to these rigid roles.

Meghan Munseeney is a Software Engineer at Yesware who also has a hand in Quality Assurance. This means she’s involved throughout the software development lifecycle from code changes to production, operations, and customer escalation.

In fact, this is a commonality among the software engineers at YesWare, since the organization has no dedicated QA team. However, Yesware is constantly able to release great software to customers thanks to star talent like Meghan.

Join CrossBrowserTesting and Meghan Munseeney on Tuesday, November 13 at 2 PM ET for “Achieving Quality Without a Dedicated Test Team” to find out how software companies like Yesware are adapting to modern testing practices by arming every role with the skills they need to be successful in an ever-changing environment.

In this webinar you will learn:

  • What the Yesware quality process looks like
  • How Yesware handles testing without a dedicated QA team
  • How Software Engineers and Developers can play a larger part in quality
  • Q&A with Meghan

Register now.

The Spectrum of Testing Practice: Why Are Some Companies Stuck in the 90’s?

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Those of us who are passionate about delivering valuable, high-quality software to our customers frequently and at a sustainable pace are living in exciting times.

Many are embracing “modern testing” principles. We’re acquiring new skills such as how to help non-testing teammates learn to test, how to analyze production use data, and how to use that data for testing. Testing is at the heart of DevOps culture, providing new opportunities for testers. We have amazing tools to help us with activities such as regression test automation and learning from production monitoring, logging, and observing.

At the same time, I still encounter many companies who are doing testing the way most people approached it 20 or more years ago. They have siloed testing/QA teams who don’t collaborate with development teams, operation teams, or even product and design teams. They have no automated regression tests or are struggling mightily to get traction on that automation. They’re doing only manual regression testing, working from written scripts, and no exploratory testing.

Why??!!!

I’ve seen leading agile practitioners scratch their heads and wonder – after two decades of sharing agile values, principles, and practices with the world, why are so many people not using them?

Teams that do use a whole team approach to testing and quality are successful at improving their processes and their product. The State of DevOps report shows correlations between the use of modern testing approaches and high team performance. So why isn’t everyone trying to use what we’ve seen work well for 20 years now?

I have no actual evidence as to why this is, but I have some unscientific theories which I’d like to share. I’d love to hear your theories too.

Lots of Newbies

The number of new software professionals is growing fast. The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicted a 24% increase in software developers alone from 2016 to 2026. Despite having heard “testing is dead” for the past 15 or so years, I see more and more testing conferences with more and more people attending them, so I surmise our profession is also growing fast.

Universities are still generally poor at teaching modern development and testing approaches, so people come out of school without expertise in agile or DevOps values, principles, and practices. They certainly don’t learn much about testing in university. So, they have to somehow discover all this once they’re on the job. If they join a company whose software process is still stuck in the 90’s, doing poor waterfall at best, they’re unlikely to be exposed to modern testing.

Culture is Hard to Change

In my experience, it’s extremely difficult to change an established company culture, especially in a large organization. Even big enterprise companies who “go agile” often transition from role-based silos to having dozens of siloed Scrum teams that don’t talk to each other. All too often, an IT organization transitions to “agile” and either leaves the testers on their own test/QA team or sticks them in a cross-functional delivery team with no training or support to figure out how they should now work with people in other roles.

Large companies often have a complicated power structure. Upper managers may be more interested in protecting their domain than in delivering better software to their customers more frequently – and they don’t always prioritize a sustainable pace. If nobody educates them on how an investment in software quality – doing things like giving teams time to experiment and learn — pays off in the long run, they just keep imposing unrealistic deadlines while their software teams burn out.

Change is hard. Even when management is receptive, maybe not all team members are willing to try something new. It often takes only one naysayer to kill an effort to move away from “the way we’ve always done it”. Companies that are strapped for money may not be able to see how an investment in learning pays off.

I once worked in a company with a “hero culture” where the person who fixed the problem that brought down the website was lauded and rewarded – so why try to prevent production problems from happening? Even after leading a successful agile project to meet an “impossible” deadline, I couldn’t affect change in that culture.

Life is Challenging

If your management doesn’t support you learning how to improve the way you deliver your software, you have to do it on your own time. As you learn, you can be a change agent and try to help your team improve.

But that takes time, and we all have many demands on our time. Some people have to work two or more jobs to support their family. Some people must spend much of each day caring for a family member. Others have health issues that limit their activities. Perhaps they can’t afford to go to conferences. Perhaps they can’t take an evening off to go to a meetup or watch online video courses. There are so many reasons people aren’t able to learn on their own time.

So, how do we promote adoption of modern software delivery principles and practices?

I don’t have any easy answers, but I’d like to start more conversations about this. I think we can raise awareness that there are better ways to work, that it’s possible to make our customers happier while enjoying our work a lot more. Here are some ideas:

  • If you can, make time to educate yourself with the many resources available to us these days: online courses, webinars, blogs, books, articles, podcasts, local meetups, conferences.
  • Share what you learn with your teammates. Help them learn about different types of testing. Try small experiments together to improve.
  • When you meet other software professionals, for example in a social situation, encourage them to join you at your local tech meetup
  • Write about your own experiences, share them at meetups and conferences, to show others that improvements are doable and effective (if public speaking scares the pants off you, check out the SpeakEasy mentoring program)
  • Contribute to scholarship programs that help people attend conferences and access online content such as webinars and videos of conference talks

We have new people joining our profession all the time. What ideas do you have to help them embrace 2018 rather than 1988?

modern testing culture lisa crispin

About Lisa Crispin: Lisa is a tester who enjoys sharing her experiences and learning from others. She works as a Testing Advocate at mabl, is a co-author of Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams as well More Agile Testing: Learning Journeys for the Whole Team, she’s a frequent conference attendee and organizer, and she is an avid donkey lover. To find out more, find her on Twitter or LinkedIn.

The Faces Behind Selenium

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The CrossBrowserTesting team is getting excited for SeleniumConf. But as we settle in to Chicago, we wanted to take a look back at Selenium’s rich history to highlight some of the faces behind Selenium and meet some of the contributors who’ve made the popular open source automation tool what it is today.

So put a face to the name (or should we say a name to the tool?), and enjoy SeleniumConf Chicago knowing that you are properly brushed up on your Selenium knowledge.

Note that there are plenty more people who have committed to Selenium, so check out the list of contributors on the site. And if you’re feeling inspired, find out how you can get involved with Selenium yourself.

Simon Stewart – Simon Stewart, a.k.a the creator of Selenium Webdriver, is well known by the Selenium community — and for good reason. He’s also a lead Selenium developer, specifically on Selenium 2, and a frequent speaker at conferences, which means you won’t want to miss his “Selenium: State of the Union” keynote at SeleniumConf. He currently works as a Software Engineer at Deliveroo and has roots at Google, Facebook, and Thoughtworks. Additionally, as Selenium goes through the W3C specification process, Simon is co-editor.

Jason Huggins – Selenium IDE was originally developed by Jason Huggins when he worked at ThoughtWorks in Chicago in 2004 — making the location of this year’s Selenium Conference fitting. Huggins worked heavily on developing Selenium RC, Selenium Ice (the IE browser extension), and Selenium Core. He was also responsible for naming Selenium, jokingly dubbed as a cure to a competitor called Mercury.

Paul Hammant – Paul Hammant joined Thoughtworks and helped move the project towards creating Selenium Remote Control (Selenium RC). While Selenium RC is no longer supported today, Hammant played a critical part in Selenium’s evolution.

Phillipe Hanrigou – In 2008, Phillipe Hanrigou created Selenium Grid and was a committer of Selenium RC. Selenium Grid is a server that allows you to run tests on remote machines at the same time through a hub and multiple nodes in order to speed up testing. This method is known as parallel testing, and today it can be achieved through this Selenium Grid or with a cloud testing tool such as CrossBrowserTesting.

Jim Evans – Jim Evans is no newbie to the software industry. In fact, he’s been part of it for 25 years, working at some major companies including Microsoft, Inuit, and Salesforce, where he works today. Evans is on the Project Steering Committee, and most notably built the IE driver and the .net language bindings. As a contributor to Selenium since 2010, this just skims the surface of all the work he’s done for the project, as well as many other open source projects. But fair warning, #neverflywithjimevans or you may not make it to SeleniumConf on time.

Aslak Hellesoy – Aslak Hellesoy is one of the first contributors to Selenium, but his list of achievements doesn’t stop there. He’s also the creator of Cucumber and co-founder of Cucumber Ltd. Don’t miss his SeleneiumConf talk on “Sub-second Acceptance Tests” where he’ll discuss techniques for making functional acceptance tests run in a fraction of the time.

Ashley Hunsberger – Ashley Hunsberger is a member of the Selenium Steering committee, but you may know her better as co-chair of SeleniumConf, which means she helped put together the killer lineup you’ll be experiencing. If you see her this week, make sure to commend her on her hard work bringing together a great community of Selenium contributors, users, and enthusiasts alike.

Last Minute Web Testing Checklist for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the Holiday Season

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It may seem like the Holiday season is a ways away, but time flies (doesn’t it feel like the year just started?). Your QA team has probably been preparing their web applications for the traffic of Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the rest of the holiday season for some time now.

But if you’re scrambling to get everything done in time, are not totally sure everything that should be done, or just wanted to make sure you’re checking all the right boxes, we’ve put together a last-minute web testing checklist to ensure your site runs flawlessly. And to make sure you avoid the same fates of other companies’ bugs and crashes.

Prepare your site so you don’t lose customers when it matters most. With the help of SmartBear tools like CrossBrowserTesting, Alertsite, and LoadUI, you can be confident in your website 365 days a year.

Test Planning

  • Run a risk analysis of your application to understand which pages receive the most traffic, as well as which are business critical
  • Put a plan in place for in case your site experiences higher traffic than expected. Come up with a strategy for getting the website back up
  • Consider creating a special error page so that customers are aware of the issue in case of downtime
  • Use Google Analytics or Mixpanel to check which are the most popular browsers configurations your current audience is using.
  • Check a site like Statcounter to evaluate which browsers, operating systems, and devices are the most popular overall

Functional Testing and Usability

  • Check essential business functions such as login, product pages, add to cart, search and filtering capabilities, and navigation
  • Test form fields and dropdowns and make sure the application responds correctly if something is not filled out. This may differ based on whether the field is optional or mandatory
  • Test that product prices are correct and shipping charges are accurate. If these changes based on location, account for it in testing
  • Make sure payment transactions are fully functional and can accept deals and promotions. Check algorithms, transaction, calculations; and ensure that it checkout works for all available forms of payment
  • Perform negative testing to discover which user actions are most likely to break the application
  • Test links to make sure none are broken
  • Manually test a full workflow to analyze the usability and functionality of a complete buyer journey
  • Use personas during exploratory testing to perform tests that account for different user journeys
  • Functionally validate through Live Testing, Record & Replay, and/or Selenium Testing

Security Testing

  • Perform penetration testing to check your application for weak spots that could compromise customer data
  • Integrate security testing into your automation with open source tools like ZAP
  • Ensure the encryption of passwords, payment information, and other sensitive data
  • Implement multifactor authentication for increased security of your users

Browser & Mobile Testing

  • Identify the most common and problematic browsers and operating systems for testing
  • Test to make sure media such as sound, videos, and images are working correctly. If you have a dynamic web page, make sure it looks as intended on different browsers
  • Identify which mobile devices you need to test on and assess responsive design
  • Mobile devices suffer from more environmental factors than a typical desktop application. Determine how your site works on a device with a poor network connectivity or low battery
  • Use real devices to get a feeling for the usability of your application on mobile

Visual Testing

  • Visually validate your website with screenshot comparisons to evaluate at a pixel-level
  • Take screenshots locally or behind a firewall using Local Tunnel to test visual elements before pages go to live to the public
  • Go through your application Live Testing to evaluate visual efficiency over multi-step scenarios
  • Make sure elements like buttons, images, and text are consistent across browsers
  • Conduct visual regression testing to ensure the layout remains stable over new iterations

Test Automation

  • Use test automation for regression testing to make sure functionalities remain stable through code changes
  • Automate small, repetitive, and business-critical test cases at the UI level
  • Analyze test results to identify where you have the most pertinent bottlenecks and commonly run into failures
  • Automate your tests against real desktop and mobile browsers with Selenium. Take your scripts to the cloud with CrossBrowserTesting to acesss 1500+ browsers
  • Leverage parallel testing to run automated tests across more browsers in less time

Load Testing and Monitoring

  • Get an estimate of how many users you expect will be landing on your site at peak times
  • Check site speed with performance and get response times for different connection speeds
  • Use load testing to determine behavior under peak traffic loads
  • Utilize pre-built load templates or customize your own to see how your website or API handles different traffic volumes
  • Stress test to get a reading on what the maximum load is before your application is unresponsive or crashes
  • Set up Uptime Monitoring to ensure you’re alerted immediately if your site crashes
  • Begin monitoring the month before so you have a benchmark to alert against
  • Enable testing and monitoring over complete user journeys and flows so customers don’t run into errors after venturing from the home page

The Top 5 Things We Learned in Our Webinar with Bas Dijkstra

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Recently, Bas Dijsktra of On Test Automation joined the CrossBrowserTesting team in the webinar “Lighten Up: Methods for Making Your Automation Suite Leaner ”.

Bas’s presentation was jam-packed with important lessons and actionable takeaways. To get the most out of it, you should take the time to watch the full webinar at the bottom of this post.

But we’re also rounding up a few of the most important lessons we learned from Bas. Here are our top five:

  1. There’s such thing as too much automation – With the introduction of tools like Selenium that allow us to automate at the UI level across different browsers, it can be tempting to automate anything we know how to write a test for. However, automation isn’t always the answer, and if you’re automating too much, it may be more of a problem than a solution when your automation suite becomes bloated. This can mean slow tests, shallow feedback, and high maintenance costs that reverse the benefits of automation. Additionally, when your suite is too heavy with automation, it no longer helps to shorten your feedback loop, and will likely add time instead. In order to get the most value out of your automation suite, Bas says that it’s important to understand where you should be testing at the UI level, when you should be testing at a lower level, and when to skip automation altogether.
  2. We have some unrealistic expectations around automation – Automation should never be the end goal of our testing. Bas advocates that we stop trying to automate everything and start focusing on automating the right things. Prioritize the business value rather than automating just to automate. Understand that not everything testers do can be automated, and not all test should be automated. Know the limitations of automation and your testing tool, and familiarize yourself with the tests that could be taken out of your suite to lighten your load to improve your feedback loop.
  3. Automation requires resources – One of the reasons why it may not be worth it to automate is return on investment, or ROI. Automation requires resources to write, maintain, run, and analyze tests. Bas says that this is too often forgotten when teams strive for “complete automation”. You have to decide whether it’s worth it to expend this energy and resources on automation, or if it would be best spent somewhere else. For example, maybe it would be more valuable to do an exploratory test of your application and do a deeper dive into areas you can’t assess with automation. Ask, “Are we comfortable not having the information provided by this test?” If you are, it might be a reason to redirect your resources away from automation.
  4. Not everything should be tested from the end user perspective – UI testing is great to test the end user perspective, but it’s not always the best method. You should automate as close to the implementation as possible and only do user interface-driven end-to-end automation when verifying end-user journeys. Ask, “where is the logic that we’re verifying actually implemented?” Often times you can run a test in the UI, but it won’t give you the feedback you’re looking for. In his example, Bas shows there are instances where testing at a lower level will give you more accurate test results.
  5. You might not need to run your automation suite as often as you think – UI tests can take a long time to run, and with multiple browsers and operating systems, it can take even longer. While tools like CrossBrowserTesting allow you access to a seemingly unlimited amount of browsers, that doesn’t mean you have to test in them all every time. Bas encourages you to decide which browsers you need to test and how often by looking at which your users are on and which are most problematic. If you think there’s value in testing in a browser or operating system but not adding it to your regression suite, CrossBrowserTesting lets you look at those same configurations in on-demand so you can test manually, as well. Bas also suggests moving tests out of the build pipeline and into an overnight job, so you’re not spending as much time running your suite.

Conclusion

As teams become better acquainted with automation, they have certain choices to make about what to automate, how to automate it, and why it should be automated. Unfortunately, sometimes we don’t ask these questions first and end up with a bloated test automation suite. Bas Dijkstra gives valuable advice for considering will actually set you up for success and give you more valuable test results.

To watch “Lighten Up: Methods for Making Your Automation Suite Leaner ” play the video below.

Balancing Your Automation Strategy with Manual Testing

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You’ve heard it a million times before — you can’t automate everything. But if your organization is just starting into the swing of automation, they’re probably thinking about all the ways they can automate. So how do you make sure you maintain the proper balance of manual testing and automation?

Whether you have an entire QA team whose roles are split between automated and manual testing, or there is one tester whose jobs is to do both, striking the right balance will be the difference between a testing strategy that provides value to your team and one that gives you more frustration than feedback.

By understanding how to best support your manual strategy with automation, you can ensure you’re getting the best of both world.

Know the Limitations of Automation

No matter how skilled you are in automation, how many Selenium commands you know, or what testing frameworks you use, some things simply cannot be automated.

For example, CAPTCHAs are often very popular with ecommerce sites. However, they’re inherently impossible to automate. This means that any test case that includes a CAPTCHA can’t be automated, and manual testing has to step in.

This, of course, isn’t the only case where you won’t be able to use automation. There are plenty of instances that it will be possible to automate, but it will be so complex to script, that you’re better off doing it manually.

Assess the limitations and challenges of test automation so you know where to step in with manual testing.

Solidify Your Regression Suite

The bottom line for automation is that you want to automate tests that are repetitive and time-consuming, so think about which tests you find yourself going through the most often. Solidifying your regression suite will help you determine which tests you want to cover after every integration or change to code.

Keep in mind that this will change over time as your application changes, but it’s helpful to have a suite that ensures basic functionality.

Additionally, deciding which environments you want to test on will be key to understanding which browsers, devices, and operating systems will be included in your regression suite.

Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff

Small test cases are best for automation and give you tests that are reusable and maintainable. The results of your automation are dependent on the state of your application, which means the smaller and more specific the test is, the more resistant it will be to changes in the UI. This is why unit and integration tests are ideal for automation.

But longer, more complex test cases and entire user journeys are often better left for manual testing. This gives you more room to explore the application and requires less time for scripting. Moreover, it means that if the UI of the application changes, you won’t have to go back into your script and figure out where it needs to be adjusted.

What’s the Risk?

When you’re thinking about whether or not to automate, risk should be a leading factor for consideration. However, while there are many methods for evaluating which tests are the most at risk, identifying these doesn’t mean you want to leave all other test cases that aren’t high risk out completely. In fact, these are perfect for manual testing.

When you considering risk, there are usually three tiers that you sort test cases into — high, medium, and low. As we discussed, most high-risk test cases will probably be included in your automation suite.

But, if you’re finding medium and low-risk cases that you still find valuable to test in order to provide feedback, then they might be something you want to run through manually.

Is It Providing Value?

Automation is a great way to speed up testing, but it also takes time for coding and maintenance, and that may not be worth it if you implement a test that isn’t adding value.

Say you run a test suite every day, and it passes 100 percent of the time. Is it worth it to keep automating if your results never change?

Just because a test was once automated doesn’t mean it should stay that way. Automation requires making changes, updates, and edits as the application code changes.

If a test is no longer providing value through automation, it might be better to take it back to manual testing to see if there are new parts to explore.

Communicate With Developers

Developers can’t tell you what to automate and what not to automate, but they can give you insight into the state of the application.

Keep open lines of communication with developers and other team members so that you are clear on what’s being changed in the application during development cycles. Depending on whether integrations are minor changes to the code, completely new features, or a revamped UI will make a difference in whether the test that follows will be part of your automation suite or should be tested manually.

To get additional insight, it may be helpful to pair with developers when going through the application to get a more in-depth look at what has changed and what areas or functions need to be tested.

Exploratory Testing

Exploratory testing is crucial to visually and functionally verifying new features and changes to the UI. Automation frees you up to test parts that you wouldn’t normally get to, so take it as a challenge to find a new bug or test for a different persona.

Human observation, curiosity, and creativity are paramount to being a tester. Automation can only take you so far when it comes to finding new bugs. That’s why manual testing, and especially exploratory testing, will always have a place in the QA process.

Visual Testing

Functional automated testing is not the only thing you have to worry about. Oftentimes, a functional test will pass because your application is working correctly, but it could still be visually inconsistent across browsers. Not only could this affect your layout and design, it could also affect the way your users are able to interact with your application.

In addition to functional testing with Selenium, you should incorporate automated screenshot testing into your workflow. This will help you account for visual cross-compatibility issues that you may have missed with functional testing by allowing you to compare screenshots of your web application side-by-side in different browsers.

Increasing Test Coverage

Automation will take care of repeated sequences, but in order to increase test coverage, you want to use manual testing to look at areas that have not yet been tested.

In this way, automation can be used as a tool to gradually help you increase test coverage over time. Test high-level functionality with automation, then fill in the gaps with manual testing. Look at edge cases and try negative testing to go beyond pass and fail results to gain deeper insight into your application.

This is also a good time to figure out what new tests you would like to add into your automation suite, so you can continue to increase coverage. Evaluate manual test cases to determine whether they would be valuable in regression, and assess which tests may be missing from the suite already.

Considering ROI

At the end of the day, it’s best to consider return on investment when deciding whether or not to automate. Automating takes time to analyze, code, and maintain.

If the time it takes to automate isn’t worth the results that you’d get from the test, it may be something you want to do manually, or not at all.

 

Webinar | Lighten Up: Methods for Making Your Automation Suite Leaner

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Bas Dijkstra webinar leaner test automation

Selenium has been the testers’ tool of choice for automated functional UI testing, but it’s too often misused. This results in inaccurate results, slow tests, and shallow feedback — and no one wants that.

If you’re struggling to write Selenium tests that meet your goals, it might be time to take a step back and get a better understand of the test cases that are best for Selenium as well as those that are better suited for testing at a lower level, or perhaps not automated at all.

Test Consultant Bas Dijkstra of On Test Automation joins CrossBrowserTesting to provide his expertise on how to de-bloat you UI tests and get your automation suite into shape. In this webinar, Bas will arm you with solutions to tighten up your end-to-end automation and streamline your Selenium strategy.

In this webinar you will learn:

  • What makes a good Selenium test, and what doesn’t
  • What is better tested at the API level, or not automated at all
  • How to future-proof your Selenium tests for better end-to-end testing
  • Live Q&A with Bas

Register Now

Bas Dijkstra

More about Bas Dijkstra: Bas Dijkstra a Test Automation and Service Virtualization Consultant at On Test Automation who’s always looking for more intelligent ways to use tools to improve test processes and software quality. He’s been in the field for over 10 years, designing and developing test automation and service virtualization solutions that enhance and improve test teams and test processes. You can read more about him on LinkedIn or Twitter.

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