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Software Testing is changing; Is your Test Automation too?

Software Testing is changing; Is your Test Automation too?

January 27, 2017
 / 
by 
Iffat Ara Khanam

Today’s customer is smart, savvy and service ready. They want stuff available to them on their fingertips- real time and interactive. They don’t like the clicks, the typing; now they want the gestures, the swipes, the zooms, and the pinches. They no longer leave their worlds behind; it now goes with them in their pockets or on their wrists. Asking your customer to wait patiently as you fix the issue is as good as saying now good bye to them, as someone with a better service has already been searched, and you sorry to say; you are dumped.

Phew! That gave me an adrenaline rush. Let me take some breaths as I make you understand what exactly I am trying to tell you. I am coaxing all you test Engineers out there to wake up from your slumber. I am asking you to understand that you can no longer afford to be traditional and conservative in your approach to testing. You have to understand that your customer’s expectations are changing. They demand better quality, they demand faster go to market, and they demand this to be made available at an unbeatable cost. But the question in here is will your decade old methods of testing and automation deliver, or it is time we move on with the new trend?

The traditional way of Test Automation won’t work anymore

Test automation is no longer a choice; it is a necessity in today’s changing times.

As per Gartner, the worldwide software testing market spending is going to be increased by 14%. The testing market size is going to be $34 bn in the year 2017, with emerging market trends of testing in agile development, mobile testing, automation etc.

In the traditional approach to automation, the break even was witnessed only after a year, if at all. Something which is not acceptable to senior management today. The initial cost to setup the automation lab, the test scripts and their maintenance is a mammoth task and no longer practical. We have moved beyond the discrimination lines of knowing programming to implement open source tools to save cost, with the coming of BDD.

In the era of devops and continuous integrations the automation teams have to gear up and allow effective testing every time, anytime with every release. The richer, real time UI’s for end customer bring challenges of dynamic object properties and traditional automation suites break more often resulting in crucial loss of time and quality.

As customers’ seek for improved quality standards of products and services with tighter costs, the pressure is built for vendors around driving automation, improved workflow and traceability and metrics capabilities in order to move up the ladder of maturity levels of testing and contribute to QA transformation.

Some of the current Trends in Testing

Behavior Driven Approach

As the roles of developers, operations, businesses merges, the call for a common language support over a platform for a collaborative and effective testing is felt sans any complexities of technology of open source tools, and costs of commercial tools. It is vital that the platform is readily available and supports authoring and execution over a shared platform. Also the solution should provide pre built keywords and accelerators to fasten the testing process.

Continuous Quality

In order to reduce obstacles for testing, simulating production environment to allow testing of complex application scenarios for faster development is required. The solution should support the integrations with the CI CD tools, and the ALM tools.

Testing on Multiple Devices

With the increase in the plurality of devices the application can support, and the overhead of creating and maintaining such test lab is a challenge most organizations are facing. There has been a surge seen in solutions providing test labs on cloud to allow running your already created scripts. But then is it enough? Looks like an incomplete picture without ensuring that the entire process from authoring of test scripts, to execution, maintenance and integrations with devops operation to be available to testing teams.

Test Automation in a Pay per-use model

One size fits all theory doesn’t work anymore. With industry shifting towards agile development practices, the testing approach has also been shifted to agile, making testing cycle shorter and crisper. You may require a few devices in one testing cycle and some other in a different cycle. In some cycle the testing hours required could be more, in another less. So why bear the overhead of maintenance of a test lab, when you can avail such services now on demand.

How are we addressing this problem

By building OpKey, a smart SAAS based test automation based platform that empowers agile team to create reliable automation tests and maintain them seamlessly. It facilitates testing to automate mobile, web and web services testing integrated with their Devops without requiring a coding background.  So it is that service which your organization can use as and when they want to test their products, and pay for the usage only. No longer you have to worry about its maintenance, or pay the hefty license fee. It also provides an interface which allows a non coder to write business language based tests so that your testing team can concentrate on what it should be doing in the first place, that is to test your product or service, instead of bothering about the framework creation.

Some of the OpKey features which enterprises just love are -

So what are you waiting for? Get your own OpKey cloud account today, to know more click here - https://www.opkey.com
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