I believe in a bright future, but we must recognize the significance of the historical shifts and have a deeper understanding of the direction of new ideas. It might be simple to spot those minute variations and improve your present Automation landscape if you are familiar with the Test Automation landscape. We’ll examine how software testing has evolved in this post and how it will affect test automation going forward.
What is Test Automation?
Test automation is a software testing technique that uses automation tools or test automation frameworks to oversee test execution rather than using human testers. It contrasts the predicted and actual test results, which are converted into assertions and run through our test scripts. Therefore, automated testing offers excellent efficacy and quicker outcomes.
Test automation can be seen as essential to both continuous delivery and continuous testing, as it extends beyond simple test execution.
Test Automation in the late 90s
Back then, we just had one testing technique that we used in all situations, sometimes modifying it based on the business. In terms of testing tools, we employed internal test management systems, spreadsheets, Rational, and HPQC.
Selenium debuted in 2004. Twenty-five years ago, SQA, Mercury, and Segue dominated the automation scene for those who were fortunate enough to experiment with automating test cases. Even so, it took a few years for some businesses to implement it (for those who are historical buffs, Rational Software first purchased SQA, and then IBM acquired Rational). Mercury Interactive was acquired by HP. After Segue rebranded its toolkit under the Silk brand, Borland purchased the business, which was then purchased by MicroFocus.
A lot of early adopters tried automating what weren’t the most stable platforms—applications that were still in development. They therefore invested more time in creating and managing automated test scripts than in software testing.
Why does test automation become necessary?
Testing is finished at the conclusion of a development cycle in traditional software development. Nonetheless, a growing number of businesses are switching to a continuous delivery approach in the current software market. Because of this, the software is always being developed and needs to be continuously deployed. To guarantee quality at every level, continual testing is used in this situation.
The most important aspect of this continuous testing strategy is ensuring good quality. If something goes wrong, it affects how quickly features and goods are released since it slows down development and testing. Time can be saved and testing requirements, including the variety of tests covered and accelerating delivery of testing operations, can be managed with the use of test automation.
Automation testing is revolutionary; it is a vital tool for every QA Engineer because of its capacity to execute numerous test cases automatically and carry out numerous validations. The goal of automation is not to replace testers, even while it can free up testers’ time for other tasks like exploratory testing or developing effective test cases. Instead, during our agile testing, we must view it as a strong ally.
The popularity of frameworks and technologies for test automation
As you read this blog post, you’re undoubtedly wondering if the tests you have in place are part of a library, a testing tool, or a test framework. Practically speaking, it’s crucial to comprehend the many choices and select the one that best suits our needs for test automation at the moment.
Selenium
We now provide you with the background about selenium. Huggins began demonstrating “the test tool” to a number of colleagues. As you can see, Selenium began as a tool similar to many other frameworks. Many were astounded by its quick and easy visual feedback as well as its potential as a reusable open-source “testing framework” for other web apps. To give it the correct definition, Selenium automation testing is basically one of the most widely used web automation frameworks, driven by Selenium Webdriver, Selenium IDE, and Selenium Grid. However, it is not restricted to only that.
WebDriver for Selenium
At its core, Selenium controls the browser and runs tests using browser automation APIs that are supplied by browser makers. The browser appears to be being used by a genuine person. WebDriver is non-intrusive since it does not demand that its API be compiled with application code. As a result, you are testing the exact application that you have made live.
IDE for Selenium
The term “IDE” refers to the Integrated Development Environment, which is a simple-to-use plugin for Firefox and Chrome that makes it possible to create test cases more quickly. Additionally, it uses pre-existing Selenium commands—whose parameters are specified by the context of that component—to record user actions in the browser for you.
Grid of Selenium
You can test on several machines and platforms because of automation’s parallelism. Capable of managing various browser versions and configurations centrally (rather than within each test) and running tests concurrently on many PCs.
We looked at the past, but what about the current state of selenium? Selenium 4.0, which was released a few weeks ago, included a lot of new features and enhancements. Kudos to automation testing in Selenium for recognizing the need for a fresh new appearance.
Appium
Appium is yet another illustration of perseverance; in case you are unaware, the open-source project Appium originated from Dan Cuellar’s kind efforts to overcome the difficulty of keeping the UIAutomation framework operational for his project. Appium started to expand and thrive thanks to Jason Huggins’ encouragement for Dan to release and contribute to the project’s early stages. The introduction of Appium 1.0 in May 2014 marked a significant turning point in the project’s evolution. The most widely used cross-platform, open-source mobile automation framework is now called Appium.
Appium is dubbed cross-platform because it lets you use the same API to build tests for Windows, iOS, and Android. It also makes code reuse possible across test suites for Windows, Android, and iOS.
cucumber
For those who are not familiar, I like to refer to BDD as “User Stories in Simple Sentences keeping our tests focalized”. I don’t mean to oversimplify, but if you can’t explain the concept in simple terms, perhaps we should simplify it a little. In the BDD software development process, business and technical staff collaborate while exploring and learning. As with Cucumber, Aslak Hellesøy was the main pushing force behind this open-source project. Hellesøy had contributed to the Rspec project in the past, but his objective was to offer a BDD framework that would be understandable to non-programmers as well as programmers.
Low-code/Codeless
In the field of software testing, there have been many developments. Low-code automation, or codeless automation solutions, has become more and more common in recent years. It can assist with various test automation difficulties; some low-code/codeless automation systems contain artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning self-healing techniques to improve test stability and save the time and expense of maintenance.
As Automation Engineers, we should become more familiar with Cucumber since we can always use Gherkin and Cucumber to convert our test scripts into BDD.
Last Words
In the agile contexts of today, test automation is essential. As we said at the beginning, I would rather work for a highly controlled government agency than a software firm. I also like to think about the future rather than the past. Still, in order to change the present and the future, we must understand the past. Using codeless testing tools or an open-source test framework makes no difference. The goal is to execute Automation testing with selenium more intelligently.