Test Design Automation
With the exponential growth and use of applications, devices, and platforms in companies’ day-to-day operations, the need for testing to be more efficient, both in time and cost has also grown. Yet, many companies continue to use old generation test design and execution techniques, risking with this, their competitivity and place in the market.
Testing automation is a strategy that many businesses have leveraged in order to remain competitive. Automated testing or test automation as defined by Techopedia, is a method in software testing that makes use of special software tools to control the execution of tests and then compares actual test results with predicted or expected results. All of this is done automatically with little or no intervention from the test engineer.
Test design automation provides a potential boost to speed and efficiency. Properly leveraged, it can also improve the end-user experience.
Although testing automation is not a recent thing. Automation has been out there for some time, but it has traditionally focused on the automation of test management and execution, leaving the test design process out.
What is Test Design?
Test design is the process of deciding how to test, what to test, and what not to test, but this a manual activity and as frequently seen in other manual activities, it introduces many risks and takes a lot of time, especially when requirements change. It involves domain, development and testing experts that would analyze the product specifications and come up with test cases to validate product functionality and this effort is non-repeatable which makes it difficult to assess the quality or efficiency of the testing.
By also automating the test design process, functional testing efforts can be significantly reduced while at the same time the quality of the testing can be increased.
So…What is Test Design Automation?
According to Bloorresearch, “Test design automation is the ability to automate the entirety of the testing process starting at an extremely high level. Products in this space are capable of generating test data, test scripts, and test cases automatically, effectively automating the design of the tests themselves.”
Test design automation can help you break the barriers to testing at the speed of agile while helping you focus on improving quality, collaboration, speed, and efficiency. More and more organizations that have adopted these practices and technology were able to:
- Improve quality, by increasing to the maximum testing coverage with the least amount of tests.
- Boost application delivery speed, by automating test design and execution processes.
- Reduce testing cost, by eliminating costly rework and early defect detection.
Consequently, organizations are applying test design automation practices around the following four key use cases:
- Requirements Engineering
- Automatic Test Generation
- Test Case Migration and Optimization
- Achieving Agile Testing
What’s next for Test Automation Design?
The impact of test design automation in powering testing at the speed of agile is increasingly evolving. Companies need to adapt new testing techniques like Test Design Automation, to keep up with customer demand by continuously delivering high-quality apps and experiences and getting ahead of the competition.
