Test Automation

Article link: https://dzone.com/articles/starting-automation-testing-from-scratch-here-is-w

Throughout this semester we have learned about how to create tests in a mostly “manual” way, today I want to explore an article that serves as an introduction and overall guide to automation testing. I especially wanted to learn about this topic since it has repeatedly come up in other articles I’ve read on this website.

Overall, I found the content of this article to be great and I think it thoroughly covers every aspect I can think of, and acts as a great beginner’s guide to this topic of automation testing. The author methodically covers everything on automation testing from the benefits of switching, to figuring out which areas of your testing should be automated.

Looking at the section of this article that lists the different areas automation testing can help is particularly interesting to me as most of the types of testing here I am unfamiliar with (and aren’t covered by our testing course) but would like to know more about. This includes areas such as regression testing, which I just learned about, and performance testing. From this article it seems that automation testing seems to help particularly with cross-browser testing. This made me think about how different web browsers are tested which is something I have only done by manually checking that the application functions properly by going through the program as a user. In retrospective it makes sense that some automated tool can make this much easier and I would like to see how this works more.

I think one of the most important points the author makes (and states many times) is “do not aim for a 100% automation”, which makes sense as the author explains how it is not necessarily feasible or beneficial to have all of your tests automated. Furthering this point, the other interesting part of this article is how the author explains that manually testing is better for certain aspects of software. After reading these reasons, I completely agree with the author that certain areas such as testing the actual user experience of a program makes more sense to test manually instead of automating. Another aspect I really like about this article that I like is that the author continues throughout the article to focus on the practicality of automating testing from a business standpoint and takes into account the amount of investment and return on investment that can be gained by automated testing.

This article has certainly made me more interested in testing automation and I would like to see how tools implement this, especially in areas the article says can really benefit from this such as regression or browser testing.