KP Frameworks

Automated testing is a process that validates if software is functioning appropriately and meeting requirements before it is released into production. This software testing method uses scripted sequences that are executed by testing tools.

Automation testers are individuals who execute testing initiatives using automated test scripts. Throughout the Software Testing Life Cycle (SDLC), they design, write, maintain, and execute automated test scripts to minimise bug escapes and release on time

Organisations employ QA teams to:

• Work and interact cross-team with clients, product managers, developers, business analysts and IT personnel.
• Establish procedures to review requirements and build test plans, strategies, documenting, roadmap grooming and spending budgets.
• Shift left and participate earlier on in the product development stages to better grasp the codebase, architecture, coding conventions, etc.

• Integrate testing tools with existing toolchains and technologies

A deeper programming and technical knowledge will help you develop more advanced test scripts and cover more critical scenarios.
To see if software automated testing is a realm you’d have a future in, here are a few sample questions to ask yourself:

• Do I like learning about the infrastructure and supporting technologies an application/software/system was built on?
• Do I find passion in uncovering real-world scenarios and edge cases that an application/software/system might NOT work properly?
• Do I enjoy learning from bug escapes and coming up with preventative measures through building automated test suites?
• Do I enjoy learning from bug escapes and coming up with preventative measures through building automated test suites?

The application code has been built, now think of a hundred ways where the code won’t do what it’s supposed to. Ensuring that issues won’t go under the radar after code has gone to production is a whole lot of learning of its own. The presentation (UI), business (API) and database layer need to be integrated and effectively communicate with each other also.

On a day-to-day basis, test automation engineers will have to touch base with technologies like:

• CI/CD: set up an automatically triggered suite of tests to fire up whenever a build is ready to be tested
• Testing IDE: a scripting workspace to design automated test scripts.
• Application Lifecycle Management (ALM): logging issues and bug tickets to track on platforms like Jira.

If you want to own the test environments, you cannot be scared of the technology stack. It's a common myth that testers are not good at coding, but times have changed, and test automation engineer finds and resolves issues by themselves.

• Automation testing requires expertise in writing scripts in several languages, including Java, Perl, Ruby, and many more.
• Tester’s code complex SQL queries to validate or create test data for ETL testing or data validation.
• Testers also facilitate migration testing by converting the written code in one database to another.

So, the fact is that writing bad code will impact your testing skills big time. Coding allows an automation tester to write scripts to maintain, monitor, and prepare test environments. It's easier to know what will make the underlying code more testable if you have a fairly good understanding of coding. You can dig deeper into databases, web servers, operating systems or message queues with confidence to fix the issues

What do Automation Testers Do?

In simplest terms, testers are just expected to automate repetitive or boring test tasks using automation tools, but there is so much more to it. What companies expect from you will heavily rely on their business requirements. They want testers who can apply critical thinking, discover flaws and contradictions, leverage different tools, and apply concrete testing techniques for well-implemented test automation.
Since organizations across various industries want to accelerate their testing process through automation and facilitate rapid software or product releases, they are always on the lookout for testers proficient in cutting-edge technologies for software testing.

• You need a good understanding of the application domain and software testing concepts in general.
• You need better technical and programming skills to build automation frameworks and develop test scenarios.
• You need to define goals and select test cases targeting those goals.
• You need to save the entire QA team's time by automating several repetitive test tasks such as report comparisons or extracting data from excel sheets.
• Consistently interact with your team to discuss more ways to improve the testing process.

How to choose an automation tool

Sometimes a single tool can be your answer. But for most of your TAE career, you may have to deal with a combination of tools for different levels of risk (unit, integration, end-to-end, etc.) and platforms.
Rather than relying on less-than-optimal criteria for tool selection, you should consider a few critical things to picking a functional testing tool, including.

• Defect category (the database layer, the business logic, the graphical user interface or GUI)
• Who will be doing automation (programmers, testers),
• Programming language and development environment
• Setup and test-data management process
• Version control and CI system
• Supported platforms and tagging