What is Automation Testing? Ultimate Guide & Best Practices

Today automation testing is the norm of the QE industry. With the assistance from automation frameworks and testing tools, testers get to increase their productivity tremendously. 

Want to start automation testing from today? This article's got you covered.

What is Automation Testing?

Automation testing is the practice of automating the execution of test cases through scripts and specialized tools. Instead of having a human tester manually executing test cases, these scripts and tools directly command the Application Under Test (AUT) to perform all actions needed. It frees up bandwidth for testers to focus more on more strategic activities.

Note that the concept of Automation Testing is not strictly limited to the Execution phase, although it is generally understood and accepted that automation testing means “automatically executing a test case”. Automation testing can actually be an umbrella term referring to the “automation of any testing activity across the testing life cycle”.

Check Out The Top Automated Testing Tools On The Market

Benefits of Automation Testing

Automation testing is the best way to enhance effectiveness, broaden test coverage, and improve execution speed in software testing. There are several reasons why Automation Testing is crucial:

• Improved Accuracy: Automation testing reduces the likelihood of human errors as automated tests are designed to strictly follow a set of predefined steps. Automated tests eliminate the chances of human testers introducing errors like forgetting a certain step while executing the tests.
   
• Increased Speed: Automated tests can run continuously, in parallel, 24/7, without the need for human intervention, further increasing the speed of test execution and reducing the overall testing time.
   
• Consistency: A lack of testing consistency and standardization can result in missing important issues. In continuous testing scenarios, such as triggering regular regression test runs, automation suites are indispensable. With automation testing, test cases are executed in exactly the same way every time they are run. They can also be run multiple times a day, ensuring that new issues are quickly identified and resolved, leading to improved confidence in the software quality.
   
• Cost Savings: Projects dealing with more advanced infrastructures or a variety of application types see the highest automation ROI. The costs of time, technologies and human resources are often the biggest blockers to automation adoption. Not only pertaining to software test automation, setting up and standardizing automated workflows don’t happen overnight. However, the long-term ROI in accuracy, speed, and consistency is guaranteed.
   
• Enhanced Test Coverage: Automated test suites can be reused to run against multiple browsers, devices and operating systems combinations. Instead of performing the exact test steps over and over again, simply lock down the most common environment your users are accessing and press run. Using cloud environments is also an effective practice to test on older versions of browsers, devices and operating systems (e.g., iOS 13).
   
• Improved Test Reusability: Once automated tests are created, they can be stored and reused across multiple systems with the click of a button, and testers do not need to spend time re-creating and executing tests for each testing cycle. 
   
• Continuous Testing: Automated tests can be run frequently and at any stage of the development process, whether it's during the development phase, integration phase, or after deployment. They can even be integrated into the development pipeline, so that they are run automatically every time new changes are made to the software.

If you're a software business or an individual working in the digital industry, investing in automation testing will surely bring immense benefits to your product development process.

Which Test Cases To Automate?

The decision to automate a test case should be based on a careful consideration of the potential benefits and costs of its automation. Following test cases are ideal candidates for test automation:

1. Tests prone to failure due to human error
2. Monotonous and repetitive tests
3. Extensive tests utilizing multiple data sets
4. Tests not feasible for manual execution
5. Manually intensive tests taking significant time
6. Tests with high potential risk
7. Tests requiring execution on multiple hardware and software platforms

It is also important to note that not all test cases are suitable for automation. Test cases for which the requirements are frequently changing and test cases executed on an ad-hoc basis should not be automated due to their unpredictable nature.

Automation testing is extremely versatile with a wide multitude of use cases:

• Industries: automated testing is widely used in many industries, most commonly being IT, eCommerce, Banking & Finance, Insurance, Telecommunications, Gaming, and even Education. Any industry with business models revolving around high functionality, stability, digital presence, or top-notch user experience can benefit tremendously by adopting automation testing.
• Application Under Tests: Automation testing can be used to test various quality aspects of websites, mobile applications, desktop applications, and API. For example, tests to verify the functionality, performance, security and usability of a website can easily be automated. Mobile applications can be tested for compatibility with different operating systems, devices, and screen sizes.
• Testing types: Testers can automate a wide range of testing types, including regression testing, acceptance testing, unit testing, or integration testing, to name a few. Here are 15 types of QA testing you should know.
• Testing environment: Automation testing can be used across different operating systems, browsers, and devices. 

If you don't know which test cases to start with, here are the list of popular test cases for you. They should give you a good foundation of how to approach a system as a tester. 

1. Test Cases For API Testing
2. Test Cases For Login Page
3. Test Cases For Registration Page
4. Test Cases For Banking Application
5. Test Cases For E-commerce website
6. Test Cases For Search Functionality

How To Do Automation Testing?

1. Choose your approach

Similar to any other testing type, you first need to decide on the approach for your automation testing project. There are usually 2 main approaches:

1. Use a test automation framework
2. Use a test automation tool

Here is a quick table comparing the 2 approaches:

In other words:

• To best utilize a framework, you must have extensive coding knowledge yourself, and the effort to maintain test scripts is significant, but you can freely customize the framework to fit your specific testing needs
• A testing tool doesn’t require coding so you can easily create tests much faster. You can switch to coding mode whenever you want (if the tool offers coding mode). Test maintenance is usually taken care of, which reduces the workload. However, you are bound by the features offered by the tool, so it is recommended to list out the features you want from a tool to select the one that best fits your demands.

2. Perform exploratory testing if necessary

If this is the first time you do automation testing for a certain system, you should first perform some exploratory testing to understand its features, so that you know what and where to test. There is really no rule to exploratory testing. It all depends on your intuition, domain knowledge, and experience. Target high-risk areas such as complex features with intricate workflows, recently modified code, integration points, etc. While you’re exploring, don’t forget to learn about the application structure. This should provide you with detailed information for the next step.

Check out this Venn diagram, which presents four scenarios:

1. Assumptions: We suspect there might be a bug here based on experience or intuition. We conduct an exploratory session to investigate this Unknown Known zone.
2. Requirements: We know there's likely a bug here since it involves a core, new, or critical feature. For this zone, we perform manual or automated testing depending on the feature's nature.
3. Questions: We're uncertain if there are bugs in this area, but we can explore it to find out.
4. Absolute Truth: We aren't even aware of this area's existence (e.g., obscure bugs unintentionally created by module interactions). Only exploratory testing can uncover these bugs.

Try to do exploratory testing with a purpose. Your mission is to uncover obscure bugs manually, but the path is unscripted. Approach it with a mindset of learning and experimentation, guided by heuristics.

Heuristics are mental shortcuts for solving problems quickly. In exploratory testing, consider the following:

• What are the boundaries of this system? What happens when we push those boundaries? For example, what occurs if you input a username that is 10,000 characters long?
• What are the error messages? A system can work correctly in one way but fail in hundreds of ways. Focusing on these scenarios can uncover many unexpected bugs.
• What confusions have you encountered? If a certain area of the product seems confusing, is there something wrong with it?

Asking these questions helps establish a route to follow. Think of yourself as a rebel challenging the rules set by developers, but do so within a framework you define for yourself.

3. Define automation scope

Only when you have understood the system ca you can start defining where to automate. Read up on available documentation, and select suitable candidates for automation. We have listed out the top test cases to automate in the sections above. Apply that to your project and list out the items to start working on. You may want to go back to the Which Test Cases You Want To Automate section. Essentially the more repetitive and predictable a test case is, the better it is as a candidate for automation.

4. Choose your tool/framework

This depends on your approach. If you go with a framework, you need the technical expertise to build the test suites and then continuously maintain them. If you go with an automation testing tools, you need some initial investment, but the ROI in the long run is significant, considering that the tool offloads a lot of the maintenance effort for the team so that they can focus on more strategic tasks.

5. Prepare test environment

There will be clear hardware-software specifications for any testing projects, and that includes requirements on servers, databases, OS, browsers, and any third-party tools needed to perform the test. For example, if you want to test a Login page, you need to prepare the browsers (Chrome, Safari, Edge), devices in a wide variety of versions (desktop, tablet, laptop, mobile), Operating system with suitable versions, and even suitable network conditions.
 

With an automation testing tool, setting up test environments is fairly straightforward. In fact, all of the infrastructure maintenance is taken care of from the vendor side, and testers only have to choose the suitable environment to run on. There are usually 3 options to choose from: run tests locally with your device being the environment itself, run tests remotely, or run on-cloud leveraging a diverse set of cloud devices. For example, here is the list of test environment options in Katalon Studio.
 

6. Design test scripts

Now comes the fun part! It’s when you write your test scripts. If you go with a framework, you’ll need to write the script in a language of your choice. Automation frameworks generally support a wide range of languages to accommodate any testers.

For example, let's automate a simple test where we navigate to a website, search for a specific term, and verify that the results page contains the search term. Since it's web testing, we can leverage Selenium, a widely-used open-source framework for automating web browsers. We'll write it with Python. To set up Selenium, use pip install selenium to add Selenium to your Python environment:

pip install selenium

After that, make sure you download the appropriate WebDriver (e.g., ChromeDriver for Chrome). Check out the latest downloads here.

Now it's time to code:

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys
import time

# Set up the WebDriver (Chrome in this example)
driver = webdriver.Chrome(executable_path='path/to/chromedriver')

try:
    # Navigate to the website
    driver.get("https://ebay.com")

    # Find the search input element by its name attribute
    search_box = driver.find_element(By.NAME, "q")

    # Enter the search term and submit
    search_term = "test automation"
    search_box.send_keys(search_term + Keys.RETURN)

    # Wait for the results page to load
    time.sleep(3)

    # Verify that the results page contains the search term
    assert search_term in driver.page_source

    print("Test passed: Search term found in results page")

except AssertionError:
    print("Test failed: Search term not found in results page")

finally:
    # Close the browser
    driver.quit()

Let's break down the code. We went through 5 steps:

1. Initialize WebDriver: Set up the WebDriver to control the browser (Chrome in this case).
2. Navigate to Website: Open the target website (ebay.com)
3. Perform Search: Find the search input element by its name attribute, enter the search term, and submit the search form.
4. Verify Results: Wait for the results page to load and check if the search term appears in the page source.
5. Close Browser: Close the browser after the test is complete.

Let's write another script in Cypress. Cypress is an open-source end-to-end testing framework specifically designed for modern web applications. It provides a fast, reliable, and effective way to write, automate, and debug tests for web applications. Install Cypress to your project with this command:

npm install cypress --save-dev

Here's the code:

// search_test_spec.js
describe('Search Test', () => {
  it('should search for a term and verify results', () => {
    // Navigate to the website
    cy.visit('https://www.example.com')

    // Find the search input element by its name attribute and type the search term
    const searchTerm = 'test automation'
    cy.get('input[name="q"]').type(searchTerm)

    // Submit the search form
    cy.get('input[name="q"]').type('{enter}')

    // Verify that the results page contains the search term
    cy.contains(searchTerm).should('exist')

    // Print success message
    cy.log('Test passed: Search term found in results page')
  })
})

Code breakdown:

1. Describe Test: Use the describe function to group the test.
2. Navigate to Website: Use cy.visit to open the target website.
3. Perform Search: Use cy.get to find the search input element by its name attribute, type the search term, and submit the search form.
4. Verify Results: Use cy.contains to check if the search term appears on the results page.
5. Log Success: Print a success message if the search term is found.

After that, run this command to open the Cypress Test Runner:

npx cypress open

With automation testing tools, you can have the best of both worlds. It's an entirely different story. Let's look at Katalon - a comprehensive test automation tool that is designed for both beginners and experienced testers and developers. It provides a complete solution for automating web, mobile, API, and desktop applications testing.

Here's a sneak peek at how Katalon works:

7. Implement test data management

Test data management is unfortunately ignored by many testers, but it plays a crucial role in facilitating the entire testing process. 

There are four main ways to judge the quality of test data:

1. Relevance: It's crucial that test data accurately mirrors the scenario being tested. For instance, if you're testing how the login page responds to wrong credentials, using correct database-stored credentials would give misleading results.
2. Availability: It's important to have access to the test data you need. QA teams typically manage access levels for test data based on roles to ensure the right people can use it effectively.
3. Currency: Software evolves constantly, introducing new complexities and dependencies. QA teams must update test data to reflect these changes, ensuring test results reflect the software's current state.
4. Compliance: Apart from technical considerations, compliance with regulations is vital. QA teams sometimes use production data for testing due to its immediate availability, but this data may contain sensitive information protected by GDPR, HIPAA, PCI, or other privacy policies.

Learn More: What is Test Data Management? TDM Best Practices

8. Execute & Analyze results

With all that ready, you can start test execution and gather results.

What elements are essential in a good report?

1. Visualizations: Incorporating charts, graphs, and diagrams enriches your report by highlighting patterns in test results. Adjusting time frames allows for a more detailed analysis of your test data.
2. Monitoring: Track project progress with features like delivery-date countdowns and version-specific pass/fail ratios. This helps in understanding project pace and performance.
3. Performance: Visualize trends in execution duration and test outcomes (pass/fail) to assess performance over time.
4. Comparative Analysis: Compare test results across different versions of the software to identify improvements or regressions in software quality.
5. Recommendations: Provide insights from a testing perspective, suggesting areas that need focus during the debugging process. 

Read More: Steps To Build A Good Automation Test Report

Challenges of Automation Testing

Of course, automation testing is not without its challenges. There is usually some compromise to be made when you want to increase testing speed. What’s important is whether that compromise is worth it or not.

According to the State of Quality Report 2024, the most prevalent challenge to automation testing is the team's lack of skills and experience in test automation, with up to 45% of respondents agreeing, followed by 38% thinking that requirements change too often, and another 26% claiming that test maintenance is costly. 

→ Download the State of Quality Report 2024 to get the latest industry insights

Here are 3 major challenges of automation testing that you may very well encounter on your automation journey, and they can totally be resolved with the right approach:

1. Initial Investment

To automate, you at least need to invest into setting up the infrastructure for automation, and that can include:

1. QA Talents with automation expertise and experience to develop automation scripts
2. Infrastructure to facilitate the execution of automation scripts
3. Training for the testing team (in terms of automation best practices and process)
4. Bandwidth to maintain the automation scripts (as these scripts may break once code changes occur)
5. If your team decides to go with a vendor-based automation testing tool, there is also the need for upfront investment into the tool.

The development of automation testing scripts is a challenge in itself. If you want to automate from scratch, testers must understand:

1. Test libraries or functions (Selenium, JUnit, TestNG, Playwright, Appium, Rest Assured, etc.)
2. Project and test artifact management structures
3. Browser drivers
4. Test design patterns and automation approach  (e.g., Page Object Model, Screenplay, Fluent)
5. Coding standards (KISS, DRY, camelCasing)
6. Test reports and execution logs

On the other hand, with an automation testing tool, these “building blocks” should come straight out-of-the-box, and testers can start testing immediately without any additional configuration. The only thing left to do is understand how to use the tool. Most of the time the complex parts of testing are already abstracted away, making it easy even for beginners to automate tests.

2. Some tests simply can’t be automated

A lot of industries are heading towards complete automation, and software testing is no exception. With the unprecedented growth of AI tech, we can expect a future of autonomous testing, where computers take full control of the testing process, and there will be little to no need for human intervention. However, it should be noted that some types of tests, by definition, can’t be automated.
 

Exploratory testing is an example. Testers simply examine the system-under-test manually. They freely interact with the system in whatever ways they want, making spontaneous decisions about what to test on the fly.
 

Exploratory testing helps testers discover new bugs, and this is a crucial point. We can’t automate the testing of bugs whose existence we are not aware of. Certain bugs require a complex series of events and interactions to trigger, and exploratory testing gives testers the freedom to “break” the system in unexpected ways to find those bugs.
 

Usability testing is another. It is also a manual type where testers evaluate the more human aspects of the system, such as user satisfaction or ease of use. Usually QA teams will choose a group of participants representing the user base of their system. These “testers” will interact with the system following the instructions of the team while providing feedback on their experience.
 

It is always recommended to take a hybrid approach: embrace automation testing, but have a little bit of manual testing in the mix to ensure that you are not missing out on those “hidden” bugs.

3. Maintenance overhead

To automate your testing is to continuously maintain your test scripts. Manual testing is simpler because you only have to record and manage the test results. However, with automation testing, you have a lot more items to work with:

• A space to manage your test scripts
• A space to manage test objects/artifacts
• A dedicated test result logging system
• Test data management

Another challenge is inflexibility. For example, a test script is created for a button on the Login page. A code update occurs and that button ID is changed, rendering the test script invalid. Testers must now update the test script to reflect the code change. As the system grows in complexity, the effort for test script maintenance also grows accordingly. Maintaining those scripts is a challenging task by itself.
 

Some automation tools introduce the Self-healing mechanism to combat this issue. Essentially you have a tool that can automatically identify and fix the broken code in the test script so that testers don’t have to manually update it. This reduces the workload of the automation team significantly so that they can focus more on other high-value tasks.

Read More: Self-healing Mechanism in Katalon

Automation Testing Best Practices

1. Have proper planning and strategy

Without a clear test plan and strategy, the testing process can become disorganized, resulting in the inability to identify and resolve defects in the software in a timely manner, leading to further problems down the line. 
 

The automation testing process should be planned and executed systematically following these steps:
 

1. Determine the scope of automation: Identify the types of tests that are suitable for automation and which areas of the software require more attention. Define what you want to achieve with automation testing and how it aligns with your overall software development goals.
2. Select the right tool: Choose the appropriate test automation tool that fits your needs and budget.
3. Prepare test data: Organize, prepare, and manage data sets that will be used in the automation testing process.
4. Design & execute test cases: Write automated test cases that are easy to understand, maintain and provide clear feedback on test results, then run the tests and analyze the results to detect any failures or errors.
5. Maintain and update tests: Foster good maintenance practices such as the page object model framework, test refactoring or tracking test flakiness. 
6. Monitor and report results: Continuously monitor the results of the automated tests and report on their performance and effectiveness. If you’re not analyzing the test reports carefully, key faults might go unnoticed.

Read More: How To Write Automation Test Strategy? A Complete Guide For QA Teams

2. Have proper understanding of the application under test

This understanding should include the application's functionality, behavior, and expected outcomes. The more familiar you are with the application, the easier it will be to identify which test cases are suitable for automation, especially the ones that are critical, time-consuming, and repetitive, and which test cases should be done manually.
 

To achieve this, you should:

• Start by reading through the  and specifications of the application to know its purpose and functionality, as well as its components and dependencies.
• Conduct exploratory testing on the application to familiarize yourself with its features and behaviors
• Work closely with the development team to gain insights into the design and implementation of the application.

3. Leverage cloud environments

Essentially, with on-cloud testing, QA teams can execute automated tests across a wide range of browsers and devices instead of investing into physical machines. This practice can bring the agility, flexibility, and cost savings needed to deliver high-quality software. Cloud testing environment can accurately simulate the real-world conditions in which the application will be used, minus the cost of setting up the right hardware-software configuration.

Not just that, testers can even schedule tests to run automatically at a predetermined time, which is ideal for regression testing, saving plenty of time and effort.

4. Improve collaboration between development and testing teams

Automation testing requires close collaboration between development and testing teams. Both teams must work together to ensure that the testing process is integrated into the development process, and that any issues are quickly addressed. 
 

Recommended best practices include:

1. Clearly define roles and responsibilities: Both teams need to understand what each other's role is, what they are responsible for, and what they can expect from each other.
2. Joint planning and testing: Teams should work together to plan and execute tests, making sure that everyone is on the same page. This can help identify potential roadblocks early and ensure that testing is efficient and effective.
3. Use a common toolset: Teams should use a common toolset for test planning, execution, and reporting. This can help improve collaboration, as everyone has access to the same information.

5. Choose the right automation testing tools

The tool should be able to support the application being tested and the testing requirements. Selecting an inappropriate tool can result in test automation failure as well as inefficient use of testing budget. Some criteria for you to consider:

• Compatibility: this automation testing tool should be compatible with your software development environment, including your operating system, programming language, and any other tools you are using.
• Functionality: the tool should have the necessary functionalities to create, run, report and debug tests. Additionally, assess whether the tool’s strength (e.g., web UI testing) matches with your testing needs most.
• Scalability: it should be scalable to meet the demands of your testing needs, both now and in the future, as your software evolves and grows.
• Integration: it should also be able to integrate with other tools you are using, such as your bug tracking system or continuous integration platform, to help streamline your testing process.
• Support: there should be good customer support and a vibrant community, with resources such as forums, online tutorials, and knowledge bases 
• Security: the tool should have adequate security measures in place to protect your data and ensure that your tests are performed securely.

A good choice is adopting software quality management platforms that integrate multiple testing functionalities (web, API, mobile) into a unified solution. 

These platforms offer end-to-end capabilities from test planning to reporting, including features like requirements mapping and automation script management. By consolidating various testing tools into one platform, they streamline testing workflows and eliminate the need for managing multiple tools separately.

Wrapping Up

In conclusion, automation testing is a critical component of any software development process. It ensures the quality and reliability of applications while reducing the time and effort required to perform manual testing. With the right tools and approach, organizations can improve the speed and accuracy of their testing, catch bugs earlier in the development cycle, and ultimately deliver better products to their customers.