In today's technology marketplace, people demand convenience, safety, comfort, innovation, design, and more from their products and services. Add to the list the preference to have these features immediately available, and you begin to wonder how companies find time to make any product appealing. The titans of technology development and test software at a rapid pace to thrive in this marketplace - to do so, they leverage automation technology.
What is a Test Framework?
A testing framework is a set of guidelines or rules used for creating and designing test cases. A framework is comprised of a combination of practices and tools that are designed to help QA professionals test more efficiently.
Challenges in Test Automation
1. Effective Communication in Team:
To have clear purposes and goals, we necessarily keep the entire team on the same page. We have to present the cost and benefit analysis along with the Return on Investment (ROI) analysis to the higher management team. Clearly, ineffective communication and collaboration can easily turn test automation experiences into a nightmare.
2. Selecting a Right Tool:
No matter what kind of process and testing methodology we have, if a tool does not match our technical and business expectations, we will give up using it. Eventually, test automation will be failed and not be applied in testing activities any longer. We will end up with a failed test automation effort.
3. Demanding Skilled Resources:
To fulfill the job requirements, resources need to have both strong programming skills and solid test automation tools. Certainly, we can utilize our resources within our test automation process to be more effective. However, skilled resources are always of importance in test automation efforts.
4. Selecting a Proper Testing Approach:
They have to answer several important questions: How to reduce the effort in both the implementation and maintenance of test scripts and test suites? Will automation test suites be having a long lifetime? How to generate useful test reports and metrics? It is ideal to have a test automation solution that can detect these issues to automatically update and re-validate the test without any human intervention.
5. High Upfront Investment Cost:
It’s necessary to analyze, design, and build a web test automation framework, libraries or reusable functions, etc. because it is required to take into account licensing costs, facilitating, and operating costs. Moreover, even though we can use free, open-source tools to reduce the licensing costs, we might spend significant efforts on learning, training, and maintaining them.
Benefits of a Web Test Automation Framework
Cost-Effective Procedure
A test automation framework, allows you to preserve the code even with common changes like test data or page objects or even through the reporting structure and so on. It is not only cost-effective but also a customer-friendly quality testing process.
Easy Scripting
It makes sure that both an individual and a team of programmers will have consistent coding. Not every programmer has the same style of coding, and this makes multiple testing necessary. It will consolidate all coding data together so that there is no chance of duplicate coding.
No Manual Intervention
Once you start the test in the automation framework, everything will be done as and when the step comes. Finally, you will get the result of the test without having to monitor it now and then. It is a great way of saving time and labour. At the same time, test accuracy increases manifold.
Scalability Application
Test automation framework increases the ability to include updates without having to go through a complicated procedure. For example, if a single blog page has to be converted into a full-fledged website, you can understand the amount of work that will go in. With the automation framework, it happens in minutes maintaining all parameters.
Reporting Made Easier, Faster
There will not be any need to monitor the test scripts. Once you start the test in the automation framework, everything will be done as and when the step comes. Finally, you will get the result of the test without having to monitor it now and then. It is a great way of saving time and labour. At the same time, test accuracy increases manifold.
Segregating Tests
You can store the test data in a separate external database such as Excel files or ODBC repositories or XML files and so on. The configuration of the tests can be done within seconds because the framework allows the test suites to cover all sorts of applications in the configuration process.
Quick Modularity
With an automation framework, it is possible to reuse the login code for several test scripts before it expires. It not only saves time and energy but also makes the testing process faster.
Recycle and Reuse
By introducing automation software, the files can be reused whenever needed, and you don’t have to develop them every single time. If the module is the same, there is no need to develop new files. It saves the need to do the same task multiple times for the same work. It makes the whole process smart and highly professional.
