Why Should You Shift From Manual Testing To Automation Testing?

Due to agile approaches, manual testing tends to be time-consuming, tedious, and prone to human mistakes when heading towards short production cycles and faster execution. Due to its simplicity in covering functionalities with less time to market, and the early detection of problems than manual testing, the need to incorporate automation testing from scratch seems to fit in the business. In so doing, the difference between manual and automation testing plays an important part in developing the program itself and cannot be entirely replaced by automated testing. But it takes the hour to turn from manual and automation testing.

Why We Hesitate While Switching From Manual Test Automation Testing?

Automation testing is viewed as a public use parameter for overcoming the manual testing issues and probably trying to rule the maximum out of it. Performing that transition is not a piece of cake and could lead to multiple blockers during this pathway. Few challenges one could face are:

1. To be preoccupied with upcoming release activities.
2. Complexity, time, and resources.
3. Test stability and scalability.

Why Should we Switch from Manual to Automation Testing?

It is one of the most important questions that your team should know. Implementing automation testing from scratch should depend on current issues faced by you while testing your application and not merely because you were influenced otherwise. Taking the right decision at the right time is more important for better quality achievement and the right to information. Below facts highlight some of the key areas of why automation is required.

Moving from manual testing to automation testing could help you with these testing types:

• Regression Testing: an ever-increasing regression sequence that needs to be performed after every release to ensure no new or old functionality has tampered.
• Complex Functionalities: complex, calculated areas that lead to human errors.
• Smoke Testing: running an automation suite for higher functionalities will help access the quality of the build. It helps save time by analyzing whether the build requires in-depth testing or not post the automation suite results.
• Data-Driven Testing: functionalities that are needed to be tested with multiple sets of data.
• Cross-Browser Testing: it is one of the bigger issues that arise when we talk about supporting applications on various browsers and versions or referring to responsive testing to validate the websites’ responsive web design. Running manual tests repeatedly on multiple browsers requires a lot of effort, time, and investment. Automating the application and operating those tests on different browsers in correspondence helps make testing quicker, dynamic, less monotonous, and repetitive.
• Repetitive Tests: tests that are are moderately repetitive and consistent from one test cycle to the other.
• Performance Testing: manual alternatives don’t exist and required the intervention of tool support.

How to Start the Automation Process?

The first step to consider while transforming from manual testing to automation testing would define a decent scope for automation testing. 100% automation is one of the myths related to automation. So defining the area is a very important element for knowing what to automate.

1. Based on the Frequency of Testing: If you have a frequent release going to hit the market, it is of more concern for automating your smoke testing and regression testing first. That will help in speeding up the testing cycles with more expeditious time-to-market with lesser manual intervention.

2. Business and Technical Priority: It is of more importance as dependent on the business needs and complexity, great testers split functionalities that require automation support first compared to others. The areas with low business priority could be removed from the scope of automation.

What can be automated is that this factor depends on a lot of areas like usability features that cannot be automated. Different aspects, like tool dependency, could also limit the areas that are to be automated. Other factors like applications supporting multiple browsers should be prioritized for the difference between manual and automation testing to save more time on cross-browser testing.

Acknowledging the Unreliable Areas for Automation Testing

There are few techniques performed manually that can generate more powerful results than automation or cannot be achieved by automation at all. These are the testing techniques that are encouraged manually than for automation:

1. Exploratory Testing: User intent to explore applications rather than following them via standard streamline workflows intended to automate in the real world. Exploratory testing could not be automated as it may follow a heavy procedure that could only be achieved by the human thought process.

2. User Experience Testing: Automation tools are not designed for capturing the emotions, the likelihood of usage or eye-soothing experience for the applications users tends to use.

3. Accessibility Testing: This testing helps in evaluating how convenient our application is for the end-users. A toll cannot measure the convenience rate as this could only be achieved through manual testing by investigating the experience by the workflow or by the application usage.

Selecting The Right Automation Tool

Automation research depends heavily on tools. What platform we choose to use to test your application for automation depends on a variety of factors such as:

1. The Domain of the Application: The range of tools depends primarily on the application’s domain, whether the application is a site or a smartphone app. If it is based on the Web-UI framework, tools such as selenium, QTP can be used, and we can use tools like Appium, Robotium, etc. when a smartphone application is open.

2. Programming Experience: This is more central to the level of comfort of the resources. We can select between the highest services for any tester or can easily use tools. Java, JavaScript, Ruby, C#, and many more, for instance.

3. Open Source or Commercial: This is more consideration from a corporate viewpoint than just a person’s preference when evaluating automation from scratch since it has budgetary limitations. 

Also read- Automation Testing Tools

Selecting The Right Test Grid Infrastructure

A flexible and helpful research grid infrastructure or a testbed for our application under test is one of the major fields of testing. A test grid or testbed is a multi-device, browser, Version, and operating system selection environment. This allows us to run the program for greater consistency with all these multiple variations. It is really important to set up our test grid infrastructure because it directly impacts our maintenance and overall cost. We have two major testbed types:

1. Test Grid Infrastructure On-Site: This helps gather real devices that help manage data, but can be costly to maintain, makes access to a wide range of multiple devices that have been put on the market each month far more difficult.

2. Cloud-Based Test Grid Infrastructure: Offers the ability to scale as much as we want from anywhere at any time. The cloud-based integrated cross-browser infrastructure monitoring grid allows navigating a much broader mix of software testing manual and hardware than most enterprises can support and maintain in their own internal on-site grid. It helps to extend the applications to multiple versions and platforms, every now and then, through cloud-based tool support, for all newly released devices on the market.

Also read- Key Manual And Automation Testing Challenges