The Most Important Factors in Functional Test Automation

1. Introduction

With Digital Transformation gaining momentum, applications need to get more robust and market-ready. The challenging digital transformation needs a rigorous testing plan that is consistent and repetitive. And this can be possible only with test automation. It is an easy, cost-effective, and repetitive type of testing. This means that whenever there is an error in the application which can lead it to failure, the automated testing approach can catch that glitch and resolve the problem to keep the application going.

But when it comes to delivering software projects, it is a must to decide the test automation strategy and the aspects of the application that requires automation. This can help the software testing team to understand the business objective of the app and offer the best testing functionalities to the software. To know more about functional test automation and its factors, let us go through this blog.

2. What is Function Test Automation?

Functional testing is one of the forms of automated testing. It deals with how the application functions and checks its relation with the users. Originally, functional testing is a concept that is implemented by a team of testers and doesn’t involve developers in the process.

Why Automate Testing?

Test Automation is used by companies to avoid repeated manual work, cut down the test running time, gain faster response, and ensure that the tests are consistent. Besides, automation helps in eliminating manual errors while executing the test.  Another major point to consider in automation testing is to get quicker feedback which eventually results in faster time-to-market.

In addition to this, this type of testing is cost-effective and lucrative. It helps in implementing changes and refactoring the code at much lower rates. Sometimes it might be challenging, and this is why understanding all the important factors of functional test automation makes the approach more efficient.

3. Top Factors in Functional Test Automation

 1. Build a Dedicated Team

When any software development company has a talented staff, it will include the smartest and newest graduates from the local universities. These types of employees can easily help the firm with the guaranteed quality of work as expected. Besides, when the company follows a flexible staffing approach, it facilitates the firm to format the team as per the changing business needs or changing client needs. To find out such excellent employees and make a team, the organization can visit sites that offer the best solutions to eliminate the normal recruiting process. Such sites can be like UpWork which offers the best people for your work at the lowest market cost.

 2. Selecting Tool

When it comes to choosing the right tool for testing, the best approach is to go with the selection process that is completely customized as per your requirements. The reason behind it is that if you do not try a logical evaluation of the automated testing tool, then you will end up choosing the wrong tool which won’t provide you results as per your requirements. So, first of all, identify your requirements, the explore tool, and select the best one. After the tool is selected, set the expectation.

Some of the best-automated testing tools are Selenium, Wapt, Waitr, Apache JMeter, and more.

 3. Measure Metrics

To see if the automation is successful, comparing manual efforts with automation cannot be the best option. For that, capturing the metrics like productivity improvement and percent of defects found. The reason behind this is that metrics matter to people as it gives them an idea of whether they should invest in QA or not. Besides, there are many companies who struggle to justify why people must invest in test automation and its tools rather than manual testing.

 4. Automation Framework

Generally, testers have a misbelief that once they select the right automated tool, they can automate everything. The truth is that using the right framework that is set guidelines for automation can help in maintaining consistency of the testing. Besides, with a framework, the maintenance of code is less. And the reusability is also improved. For software automation testing, the top four types of frameworks are –

• Data-driven automation Framework
• Modular automation framework
• Keyword-driven automation framework
• Hybrid automation framework

Choosing the perfect one can help the testers in making automation a success.

 5. Budget Cost and Process

One of the most important factors in functional test automation is budget. A dedicated budget is a must. It must include the costs related to the testing tools, resources, development, and training. Besides this, the maintenance cost for the automated tools and testing must also be included in the budget from the very beginning. All these are important as at the time of purchasing the testing tool and training all the employees in your software development company can be very costly.

In addition to this, having a well-defined testing process is also very important as it defines the coverage of the test. Therefore, a quality control procedure and test execution must be defined in advance with the help of the experts.

6. Reducing Testing Time

Reducing the testing time is very important. Though automation is not the main reason behind extended testing time, a number of bugs are. Finding and fixing those bugs in time by following proper procedures, is very important and that is where automation comes in. Automation can fix the bugs in a repeated process which keeps the system safe and all these can be done in much less time than manual testing.

Besides, analyzing the system failure and clearing it up takes a longer time, so if done with the use of automation testing, it can take less time.

4. Conclusion

As seen in this blog, testing the functionality of a software or an application, just like creating a roadmap for its sustainability and growth. It is a very crucial activity that helps in making the application robust right from its development phase. So, if this process is automated, it can bring speed and competence. But this must be done using a combination of many different factors. Some of those factors are described in this post.

Following these factors can enable the software development experts to write test scripts for applications’ functionalities in an automated way. This means that the software testers do not have to manually write the testing scripts for every feature. The automated tool can do it for them. Basically, following the factors correctly in functional automation testing can make the software testing process repeatable, cost-effective, and bug-free.