Regression testing comes along with a lot of misconceptions and misinterpretations. While we talk about regression testing, there are lots of things that can strike our minds. What actually is Regression Testing? why one should automate regression testing? What are the steps to automate your regression testing? How does it improve the team’s productivity? To understand all of these, let’s take a deeper glance at automated regression testing.
Regression Testing: Definition
Regression testing is a part of software testing that ensures that the previously developed and tested software align well with changed version of the other software. In other words, it facilitates the developers in knowing that their software continues to behave in an expected manner even after making the changes.
The motive behind regression testing is to check that the new code does not trigger an old bug or defect which might have been left unfixed during the past test cycle.
What Is Automated Regression Testing?
As regression testing is repetitive therefore developers and testers consider it to be a time-Consuming process, so to speed this up testers use automation regression testing tools. When we say automation, it implies a series of pre-written scripts which are executed after a code is changed with negligible or no human interference.
There is so much involved in regression testing. The tester needs to examine all the aspects of the system, fix the root of the problems, monitor the project over an extended time frame, and define how the code change was triggered. To handle these challenges with ease and also to integrate regression testing into the general project management framework the companies use automation.
Benefits Of Leveraging Automated Regression Testing
By automating regression tests, it is possible for developers or a company to achieve a number of desired outcomes that not only would enhance team agility but also increase product quality.
- When we indulge in Regression testing we are capable of providing teams with those insights that can otherwise be ignored.
- It improves the quality of problem solving and helps the team during the project maintenance.
- It simplifies and manages all the iterations, creates unified standards across all the projects, save time and prevents the team from having to fix human error-based issues.
- It’s somehow reducing the workforce of testers. With automation, no workforce needs to run continuous test iterations.
- Automated regression testing helps QA managers allocate responsibilities to team members efficiently. As automation testing do not require human efforts, it can go for continuous 24/7. This way other members of team can focus on the task that are more complex and are of higher priority.
- By automating, tests run continuously at the speed and frequency simply not possible with a manual testing approach. Automation, therefore helps to increase the scalability of testing.
- With automated regression testing, the defect is detected at the earliest stage of development, allowing higher user satisfaction.
- Although the initial investments are maybe high, however, automated regression testing is useful and beneficial in long run. While leveraging it your business can surely avail maximum revenue.
- When teams test manually, they don’t get enough time to test more. Such practices may leave various defects unnoticed. However, using automated regression testing allows the testing teams to carry out more tests and assess all the code changes deeply.
How To Automate Your Regression Testing?
Regression testing includes high coverage and is little complex making it a multi layered process to pursue. Here are a few steps that automation testers could follow for a smooth automated regression testing workflow.
- In the first step, the developer or tester should estimate about which system component needs alterations and to what extent.
- Followed by the software change analysis, the developer should next point out all the possible impacts of the code change across the entire system. In this step it’s important to examine and fix that feature that would possibly harm the system.
- The next step includes building a regression testing strategy. A good regression testing strategy would include.
- Gathering test data
- Automating test cases
- Estimating the time for test casing
- The real execution of tests
- Reporting
- The next step to execute automated regression testing is to create a test suite. At this stage a QA (Quality Assurance) specialist would work on writing automated tests.
- The next step is executing regression testing. While executing, one must maintain a high frequency of testing through a flexible reporting system setup.
- The final and the most crucial step is to report the outcome of testing to stakeholders. It can be your client, or anyone else who is related to the project.
The report can include the following parameters:
- Analysis of metrics
- Scope of testing
- Describing how testing helped the team and Planning
Some Popular Tools To Practice Automated Regression Testing
With a number of automated regression testing tools available in the market, it is important for the developers or the testers to know which one is important. Some of the trending tools for automated regression testing are as follows:
- TestComplete
- TimeShiftX
- TestDrive
- Sahi Pro
- IBM Rational Functional Tester
- Silk Test
Conclusion
Catering to the importance that automated regression testing holds, we can say that it is becoming more crucial in coming times. If a team wants to excel in the maintenance of the project and ensure high user retention rates, then it is vital to improving their overall delivery results with automated regression testing!
To pursue such goals, a lot of tools are available in the market that allows leveraging automated regression testing, however, the selection of test tool entirely depends on the requirements of the project. Therefore, a tool selected must offer capabilities to update the test suite similar to the Regression test suite that needs frequent updates for effective results.
Good Luck! Test Wisely!
