#testautomationframework

Test Automation Framework for Banks | Automated Testing in Banking | Cigniti

Every software application under development needs to be tested on various parameters to ensure they meet the exact quality standards envisaged by the client and the development team. It is also done with the objective of making the software application acceptable to the end-user. However, given the scale and the number of software applications that are released to the market courtesy the use of Agile and DevOps methodologies, the testing process is always under stress. The traditional waterfall method of manually testing the software post-development is fraught with errors and inadequacies. Besides being extremely complex and time-consuming, it is incapable of delivering a flawless software application to the end-users.

To rule out such issues and ensure the software application meets every quality parameter and regulatory standard, a test automation framework is integrated into the development cum testing process. With mobile and web applications being churned out like hot cakes, it is only by leveraging software test automation services that quality considerations are not lost count of in the overall scheme of things. These help businesses to test any software application under development across devices, operating systems, browsers, and networks within an omnichannel environment. A test automation framework helps testers to standardize every test automation asset and drive the testing process seamlessly, quickly, efficiently, and cost-effectively. Let us understand the framework in some detail.

What is a test automation framework?

An automation framework is a set of processes and tools used to execute software QA automation of any software application. It is also a set of guidelines, rules, protocols, or best practices to create automated test cases and make efficient use of test resources. The framework comprises elements such as test data, libraries, and various reusable modules.

Why use an automated QA testing framework?

To understand the need for employing an enterprise intelligent automation framework, let us consider a scenario. If the testing team comprises members who are used to working with different automation testing tools, they may find it difficult to understand the scripts or code updated by one of the team members for a specific project. This is where an enterprise process automation framework can offer the option of reusing the code or script in various scenarios as well as writing the script in a standard format. Further, the framework can help to reuse the test scripts many times for different builds. The other benefits of using such a framework are as follows:

Follow a standardized policy to achieve design uniformity across test suites

Drive the testing process quickly and efficiently

Enable root-cause analysis for the application under test

Easy maintenance and reusability of test scripts

Achieve optimal utilization of resources and maximum test coverage

Achieve continuous testing and delivery of code as per DevOps

Achieve accuracy in testing

What are the types of software QA automation frameworks?

The various types of test automation frameworks are as given below:

Linear automation framework: Also called the record and playback framework, it is commonly used to test small applications in a linear manner. It does not entail the writing of custom code and automation scripting is executed incrementally with new interaction being added to the tests. Modular testing framework: Here, the entire application is broken down into smaller modules based on the client’s requirements to create independent test scripts. The scripts so written are easy to maintain and scale. Further, for each component or module, an abstraction layer is built that is hidden from the software application under test. The abstraction layer ensures the changes made to other parts of the application do not impact the underlying components.

Data-driven testing framework: In this type of enterprise intelligent automation framework, test data is loaded into variables inside the script after being read from external files, namely, text files, excel files, ODBC sources, CSV files, and DAO objects. It allows testers to create test scripts by using different test data sets. Here, a single script can execute multiple test cases with different data sets.

Behaviour-driven development framework: This type of framework creates a platform wherein every stakeholder in the project can participate, namely, developers, QA testers, and business analysts, among others. The testers can use natural language to build test specifications, which can be easily understood and analyzed by non-technical people.

Keyword-driven testing framework: Also known as table-driven testing, the framework is useful to test applications for smaller projects. In this application-independent framework, which is an extension of the data-driven testing framework, keywords and data tables are used to execute actions on the application. Also, since a single keyword can be used across test scripts, the code can be reused.

Hybrid test automation framework: It is a combination of data-driven, modular, and keyword test automation frameworks, which leverages the benefits of other frameworks. It is a flexible framework that can be custom used to test different applications with different processes.

Conclusion

The above-mentioned automated QA testing frameworks can be utilized efficiently to test the code as per the project requirements, budget, and team expertise. These help to boost productivity, efficiency, and test coverage through standardization.

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James Daniel is a software Tech enthusiastic & works at Cigniti Technologies. I'm having a great understanding of today's software testing quality that yields strong results and always happy to create valuable content & share thoughts.

Test Automation Accelerator for Insurance Company | Case study

Enterprises across the globe using Oracle Cloud Applications often face similar challenges while testing their applications. Their key questions remain the same.

How can they work out what to test?

How can they understand the changes that come with frequent updates?

How to maintain test automation scripts?

Finding suitable answers to the above questions is important to keep business disruption at bay. Enterprises that struggle to find answers to these questions often leave the business at risk. In this blog, we’ll discuss how “risk-based” continuous testing can help in addressing these challenges.

What to test?

Oracle cloud apps are ever-evolving that receives updates thrice a year. These updates bring new functionalities, features, & bug fixes that help enterprises to efficiently and effectively manage their operations. Since these updates have the potential to negatively impact the existing business processes, enterprises need to regressively test the updates prior to deployment to the production. Oracle offers a two-week window for testing. However, the biggest challenge is “What to test?” Oracle cloud apps are huge, can be customized and integrated with a range of applications. QA teams often find themselves in a dilemma while deciding what to test and how many regression cycles they need to run.

How to understand changes that come with frequent updates?

Updates every quarter means that every three months enterprises will receive new functionality. Anyone responsible for managing and supporting Oracle Cloud Apps needs to understand how new features are going to impact current business processes. Since new features could have major implications for operational efficiency, even small changes need to be tested.

How to maintain test scripts?

QA teams often struggle to maintain the test scripts. Oracle Cloud Apps feature dynamic elements. Updates in Oracle Cloud Apps often bring navigation changes, change in the object metadata and properties, and changes in the table structures. Due to these changes, test scripts tend to break, leading to unstable test results.

Risk-based Continuous Testing – Helping you keep pace with Oracle Cloud Frequent Updates

How to decide which test cases are important is a daunting task. Whatever testers consider may not be necessarily important. Our vast industry experience suggests that QA teams often go for a “test everything” approach. However, they tend to achieve only 40% of the risk coverage. On average, 70% of the test cases don’t contribute towards test coverage. Rather they make testing slow to execute and costly to maintain. We recommend the “Risk-based Testing” approach that focuses on risk coverage. AI-powered risk-based testing helps QA teams to focus on test cases aligned with business priority. With this, QA teams can quickly reach optimal coverage with focused continuous test automation. With continuous testing, QA teams can test early, often & comprehensively using an automation framework, enabling IT managers to make informed decisions on the optimization of the value of a release.

The proposed Oracle Cloud Test Automation Framework should support

Change Impact Maturity – Always select an Oracle aware automated test framework that highlights the changes in your transactions, configurations, and custom screens after the update and immediately identifies the testing impacts due to those changes.

Risk-based Test Recommendations – The selected test automation framework should take away all the guesswork out of determining what needs to be tested before changes are deployed to your Oracle Cloud apps. The test automation framework should recommend test cases based on the highlighted risk and their dependent components to eliminate hours of effort and struggle.

Autonomous Healing of Test Scripts – Oracle Cloud test automation framework should alleviate the “maintenance burden” that undermines the test automation initiatives. The test automation framework should come with autonomous healing capabilities so that changes can be accommodated automatically without requiring human efforts. It will save hours of manual effort.

Summing Up

In current market scenario, organizations not only want to test software effectively, but also as quickly and comprehensively as possible. To achieve this goal, organizations are turning to test automation services.

Why do organizations need a framework for test automation? The simple answer is it helps organization to standardize the test automation process irrespective of the tool and provide effective results. A Test Automation Framework is basically a set of guidelines or best practices which can be followed in a systematic way to achieve the desired result. When it comes to test automation there are lots of tools available in the market, as an organization, you can drive all the tools using a single framework and see results. The full potential of a tool can be extracted using a test automation framework and it also helps in the accuracy of the result.

Let us now look at the multiple reasons why an organization might rely on a test automation framework.

Benefits of a Test Automation Framework

Given below are some of the reasons why using test automation framework has become so valuable and essential these days:

1. Cost-Effective Procedure

The maintenance cost of testing tools is quite high. A test automation framework, allows you to preserve the code even with common changes like test data or page objects or even through the reporting structure and so on. When a client asks for a change in the application, you cannot say no, right? This is when automation framework will rescue you. Without spending a penny extra you will be able to implement the changes which would, otherwise, not have been possible in a manual setup. It is not only cost-effective but also a customer-friendly quality testing process.

2. Easy Scripting 

This is probably one of the biggest benefits of test automation framework because it makes sure that both an individual and a team of programmer will have consistent coding. Not every programmer has the same style of coding and this makes multiple testing necessary. Even when you are working in a team, you will have different coding patterns, but at the end of the day, what matters is whether or not it passes the test. That is what automation framework offers. It will consolidate all coding data together so that there is no chance of duplicate coding.