Introduction

Test automated is definitely the most talked about topic when it comes to automated software testing. With no surprise, it welcomes numerous benefits to your software testing outcomes and helps minimize your efforts.
How beneficial the test automation can be for you depends entirely on the way you perform it.
As there are several ways of performing any test, test automation is of no exception. But not all the ways can bring optimal results from your automated testing efforts.

Do you want to make your automated software testing efforts worth it for your big or small enterprise?

Let’s walk through these 5 efficient ways you can handle this critical testing process for enhanced efficiency and greater outcomes.

1. Determine What Test Cases to Automate First

It is absolutely not possible to automate all the test cases. So, we need to choose what test cases we need to automate first.

One of the greatest benefits of automated software testing is that we can perform the tests many times. So if we want to handle this smartly, we need to figure out what test cases require auto testing only a few times. With the right software testing planning and test strategy, we can eliminate those and spare them for manual testing.

While you’re creating tests, make sure they are focused and targeted to only one objective. Such simple tests can help you perform automated tests more efficiently. Moreover, you may exclude more simple ones from automated testing.

You might have experienced such test case examples that become problematic in the later stages.

Another good option is to group several simple tests and then perform one larger automated test. You can group your simple tests into one automated test by organizing:

• application’s functional area
• minor/major division in the application
• common functions
• a base set of test data.

While you select automated tests, some of them may refer to other tests. For that, you should create a test tree to run your chosen test in a particular order.

2. Test Early and Test Often

A key to perform more efficient automated QA testing is to start the testing process right from the beginning. And it’s even more important to test quite often rather than performing for only a few times. Any of the testing strategies you choose while you’re doing software test planning, make sure you keep early testing as priority.

It is evident that the more often you perform tests, the more you’re likely to find defects and bugs. Therefore, it’s important to be involved in the life cycle of the software development and deal with the defects right from the beginning.

As a matter of fact, if you’re able to detect bugs at an earlier stage, it will cost you much cheaper than fixing them in the later stages of the deployment. Being a big or small enterprise, cutting down extra costs is always the priority and early testing helps significantly in this way.

3. Choose the Automated Testing Tool Wisely

The successful test automation also largely depends on the automated testing tools you choose. There are several automation testing tools available, it’s your choice to select the best one.

But the most important part is what automated testing software or tool should be selected to perform automated testing.

How to select an automated testing tool?

• Choose any of the automation software testing tools that offer support to your technology platforms.
• Look for the tool that provides flexibility to automated software testers at all levels of skill.
• Must be able to perform automated tests easily but must possess high-quality and rich features.
• Should be capable to reuse, maintain, and resist modifications in the applications UI.

4. Break Down Automated Testing Tasks

You might have heard the famous saying “Divide and rule.” This goes perfectly right when it comes to automated software testing.

Software test is a big task involving several phases performed by different individuals. The tasks must be assigned based on the skill level within your Quality Assurance (QA) department.

Different members of the QA team must also collaborate on a given testing project to scale out their potentials and outcomes of the project.

While creating test cases, automated test scripts, and other testing related tasks, the duties must be smartly assigned to those who are expert in handling a specific automation testing software task.

We have to make sure nobody gets more burdened that will eventually lead to a delayed project with lack of quality.

5. Focus on Generating Quality Data

It might be extremely boring for you to create test data to perform automated tests. No matter how boring it may sound to you, it’s essential to invest time and effort on it. To your surprise, if you have successfully developed good test data, you can easily write automated tests.

Once you have developed good quality test data, you will find it easy to extend existing automated tests as you step into further phases of automated software testing. If done wisely, you can save your time and effort to prepare test data.

Data-driven testing greatly depends on good test data. The data developed for automate testing is stored in an external file like excel, XML files, and database tables. If you have a good automation testing tool, it will easily accept the external file and understand its contents.

You can use these external data files to extend the existing data and add different testing scenarios. Also, you can always edit the data file without touching the actual automated test.

And as always, if you have any thoughts to share, you can also write them down in the comments section.