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Software upgrades are now an accepted part of everyday life. They are delivered by developers to improve the application's functionality, patch vulnerabilities, and introduce new features. However, these updates need to be properly verified before they are distributed to devices because they may contain pieces of code that interfere with the operation of the existing application code and cause bottlenecks in that functionality.
As a result, before deploying these updates, regression testing is carried out to ensure that the code changes do not have an unfavorable effect on the application's functionality.
It is currently performed manually, but many organizations are transitioning to automated regression testing because it runs the testing in a significantly shorter amount of time and does not require any human intervention after the inputs have been submitted. In addition, these tests can be carried out at any time, day or night, without the requirement for a professional team to assist.
How to Automate Regression Testing
Manual regression testing is a time-consuming technique that necessitates a considerable deal of repetition. Tests have to be run numerous times to ensure that the code is totally functional. It becomes difficult to perform manual regression testing when there are a large number of code changes, various modules, and many individual tests to be performed.
During automated regression testing, the team only decides on the test cases for each module and platform. Then, these test cases can be run an endless number of times.
Automating regression testing can be accomplished through a variety of methods, including the development of simple scripts with test cases or the use of a third-party automation tool.
Let's look at how we can automate regression testing.
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Choosing the Right Approach for Regression Testing
To reduce the workload, the organization can implement a number of different approaches, such as writing a simple script to automate the different test cases. However, these scripts do not alleviate the situation as the tests need to be repeated. Therefore, the scripts need to be run every time. They also can't be run parallelly on different modules. So, numerous third-party utilities are needed.
As previously indicated, organizations can either design their own in-house tools for regression testing or leverage the services of third-party vendors to do this task. Such tools have a large number of different mobile devices that you can utilize to carry out the testing tasks. So, it is always recommended to use third-party utilities for automated regression testing.
Creating Test Cases
In software development, test cases are critical because they give scenarios in which the code or modules may be tested. It should be essential to build test cases for each module and every situation in which they need to be tested. All the test cases that are being developed should have been written in such a way that they increase the likelihood of triggering any regression that may have been introduced into the code throughout the development process.
There are a few approaches that can be considered while creating the test cases:
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To perform comprehensive regression testing, both positive and negative test cases should be included in the set of test cases, with positive test cases passing a majority of the time and negative test cases failing the majority of the time.
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To ensure that new code is tested properly, it is necessary to run all prior test cases for old code simultaneously. This is necessary because the old code may experience regressions as a result of the new code or functionalities.
It is vital to ensure that the chosen test cases cover all pieces of code. It's also important that there are no duplicate test cases, as duplicate test cases will cost time and not result in a positive outcome.
Executing the Regression Test
After the test cases have been identified, they are ready to be implemented into the system. It is possible to take a number of alternate approaches to this problem. These tests should be executed on a separate branch of the code to prevent new bugs from being introduced while the tests are performed. It is necessary for a few systems to be in a specified state while the tests are being run for them to function properly. Because of this, it is critical that the tests be sequenced so that there are fewer state alterations.
Since we are utilizing an automated regression testing platform, there are a variety of things that you can do with it, such as integrating those tests into the continuous integration (CI) environment. Additionally, you can also perform parallel testing in different environments.
For example, suppose your application is built for Android, and different users are likely to use different Android versions. In that case, you can test the code in each version simultaneously and export the report to look for the root cause of any issues detected. This will save the significant amount of time that would have been spent running test cases one at a time. After the execution is completed, you can export the report and identify the root causes of the issues that need to be patched.
Conclusion
Automated regression testing saves a significant amount of time for the teams that are working on the tests. They only have to build the test cases, which are then executed automatically. Since most automated regression tests also provide a report, the team will be better able to determine the underlying cause of the issues for which the test cases have failed. You can also incorporate the tests into the CI process so that some of the runaway occurrences can be prevented.
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