What is the Scope of Automated Testing?

What is the Scope of Automated Testing?

Written by Dev Yoda on Mar 18th, 2021 ・ Views ・ Report Post

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Software testing is the process of evaluating if a piece of software works as expected. It tries to uncover unidentified bugs within a system and measure its overall quality, usability, performance, and requirements.

Software testing can either be carried out manually or with the use of automation tools. Every software testing journey's starting point is to understand the software's requirements or expectations and then define test cases to validate such requirements or expectations. Test cases are a set of conditions for determining if a feature of a software product complies with business requirements.

In manual testing, such test cases will be carried out manually by the software tester or developer every time a new feature or piece of code is added. On the other hand, automated testing involves converting test cases into test scripts and using a selected automation tool to run them.  With test automation, test scripts can be written once and run automatically any number of times, as needed, without human intervention. 

I've been learning and writing about testing a lot. In this article, I'd like to focus on the scope of automated testing. The goal is to help you get answers to the question: when should you automate tests, and when should you not?

The essence of automation is to reduce the human impact or effort required to test, save time, and shorten the product release cycle. This sounds so good that you may be tempted to ask: why not just automate everything?

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As much as automation saves time, it comes with a cost. The truth being that automation requires a high initial investment and does not always lead to improved software quality in some use cases. Before you consider automation, ask, "Is this the right choice?" and remember that not everything that can be automated should be automated.

When and What Should You not Automate?

  1. Usability Tests: Usability tests usually involve testing and observing how easy it is to use a  design by a group of users with different abilities. Such tests cannot and should not be automated because results depend on human perception.

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  2. Random Tests:  Random, sudden or one-time tests such as exploratory tests that may require domain knowledge in a bid to identify potential bugs or flawed processes cannot and should not even be automated.

  3. Early Stage Features: You should not automate tests for features when their requirements and design specification have not reached a certain point of stability since the flow could change every few weeks.

  4. Small scale projects: It would be unwise to consider test automation for small-scale projects with few process flows. The effort and investment will not equal the ROI (Return On Investment).

  5. Low priority features: Don't waste time and effort in automating tests for low priority functionalities rarely used. Again, the effort will not equal the ROI, and automation should be all about ROI since automation tools are usually paid services.

When and What Should You Automate?

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  1. CRUD operations: Tests for CRUD operations always maintain the same process flow: enter, store, update, delete data and verify the validity of data at each stage. This is a repetitive process, and so is a good candidate for automation.

  2. Business-critical processes: User flows which, when they fail, could cause considerable damage to the business returns, should be automated. For example, in an eCommerce setting, adding to cart and checkout is a critical process flow.

  3. Performance tests: Performance tests determine and compare how the stability, speed, scalability, and responsiveness of an application holds up under different workloads. Such tests should be automated so that reports can be generated automatically too.

  4. Parallel/distributed environments tests: Tests that need to be run and verified across distributed environments should be automated, e.g., cross-browser testing.

  5. Repetitive tests: Repetitive tests that need to run on every build, such as regression tests that confirm that a new code update does not break existing features, should be automated.

  6. Complex tests: Tests that take a long time, require many initial setups, or large data uploads to run should definitely be automated to save time. For example, in eCommerce, some test cases can require that hundreds of products be uploaded first.

In summary, automated testing is ideal for stable repetitive test cases that have predefined valid results resulting in either fail or pass. In contrast, manual testing is perfect for test cases that are varied, volatile, and require human input.

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