Meaningful testing is imperative for accelerated mobile application growth. Testing for the amount of variables (network quality, battery life, available memory, etc) can help lessen the amount of unseen issues. Additionally, what may work in a development environment may not necessarily reflect the experience of your end users. Experienced QA testers understand that customization is a must. This may be one reason that while test automation continues to be a hot topic in the world of DevOps, it currently accounts for only 16 percent of software testing activities. While automation testing should have a standardized process, it’s quite more customizable than it sounds. What is automated testing In today’s competitive world, there’s a constant need to deliver software – faster as well as better. This is only possible through effective and efficient software testing. Agile development demands for minimum time to market. Automation can play a pivotal role in achieving this without major cost overruns or post-release errors. Automated testing uses software to control the execution of tests and compares actual outcomes with hypothesized ones. It automates test cases to increase the efficiency and productivity of your QA testing and is critical for continuous delivery and testing. “The automation of QA activities is not only required but is the core enabler of increasing throughput and velocity.” – World Quality Report Manual testing can be rather tedious. Furthermore, it becomes cumbersome when tests are repetitive. As such, automation is most effective whenever tests are highly repetitive while reducing manual errors. How to customize your testing process Effective QA teams create flexible tests that are resistant to changes made to applications currently under test. Implementing automation without negatively impacting other commitments can be a challenge. An ideal automation framework is one that’s developed in such a way that it’s reusable for multiple applications. This allows for a better cost-benefit ratio and faster ROI. Below are top approaches to simplify your automated testing. Single responsibility Generally speaking, you should keep test cases to a single verification point or a small group of hyper-relevant verification points. This will tell you if a feature actually works as expected. If a single test case only verifies a single action, then you can immediately and efficiently work through whatever problem has been flagged. On the other hand, if a single test case covers various other functions, you’ll need to do much more troubleshooting. Focus your regression In exploratory testing, you may do several types of experiments testing features all in the name of exploring the mobile app and finding issues. But test automation doesn’t explore. Instead of writing long, meandering test script, determine what you want to test for and keep the scope narrowed specifically to that feature / action. Positive and negative test cases If you’re getting lost in an endless script, consider drafting positive and negative test cases. This helps maintain a brief yet purposeful script. For instance, if you need to test the functionality a password changes, you’d create a test to change and verify the password, and one to ensure incorrect passwords are denied. If you need to test the password functionality for example, you should create at least three separate test cases: incorrect password, correct password and password changing. This allows you to execute and maintain tests over time. Modularity helps to better maintain tests over time. Embed tests scripts There is a growing need for continuous software testing. Without automation, there’s no capacity to scale. Even still, the path to continuous testing is not always straightforward. By wiring the tests directly into the QA workflow enables you to see a comprehensive picture of your application’s quality and coverage. As each stage tests code, it must also include the necessary automation not only to run the test, but to deploy, setup, and configure staging environments. Each stage becomes more production-like, providing more confidence in the code as it progresses through the pipeline. Test cases to automate While automated testing helps teams improve software quality and make the most of their always-limited testing resources, it’s important that companies understand which test cases can – and should – be automated. “Whatever your internal criteria, it is important just going through that exercise and saying, ‘We’re going to automate in this priority order because we know that these are the most important tests to maintain.’” – Melissa Tondi Frequent and repetitive tests. Tests subject to human error. Tests requiring multiple data sets. High risk, business-critical tests. Tests that run on various hardware or software platforms and configurations. Tests that are tedious or difficult to perform manually. Tests that are time-consuming. Final thoughts Automated testing is a valuable tool that produces efficient, fast, and cost-effective testing systems. This results in reduced overhead and a sizable return on investment. Testlio helps you master continuous delivery with reliable automation testing. By continually diagnosing issues, our seasoned QA managers develop scripts that help you keep pace with customer demands. Let us build a customized automated test process for you.