Best Practices for Automated Testing [Webinar Recap]

Test automation can help your team deliver products faster with fewer bugs. But test automation doesn’t solve everything.

So, many organizations are doing both automated and manual testing. That makes it difficult to keep track of test cases and test results.

There’s a better way to keep track of your testing efforts.

In a recent webinar, Technical Sales and Professional Services Manager Nico Krüger discussed best practices for automated testing and consolidating your testing efforts.

Watch the webinar >

Or read the quick recap below.

Automated Testing Best Practices

Automated vs. Manual Testing

Many organizations need to do both automated and manual testing. And that’s not a bad thing. Automated and manual testing can work together to help your testers cover more ground.

What's the Testing Process Flow?

The testing process flow is how organizations determine, execute, and track testing efforts. The same flow applies to both manual and automated tests.

1. Define and Develop

When you create hardware or software, you need to define what it is you’re developing. Then you need to validate those items.

2. Create Tests

Next, you need to create test cases. These need to be validated against requirements, user stories, or epics to make sure you’ve covered what you defined in step one. Effective test case management is critical to this step.

3. Execute Tests

Tests can be executed manually by your testers. Or they can be executed using test automation tools such as Selenium. With both manual and automated tests, you’ll get results that the test either passed or failed.

4. Resolve Issues

If there’s a failure, you’ll need to create an issue. Then that issue needs to go through the testing process again to make sure it’s resolved.

Manual Testing Is Here to Stay.

Not all tests can be automated right away. When you create a new system and write new code, it’s easier to start with manual testing.

It’s critical for manual testers to make sure they test the right things and that the test case covers the user story as defined by your solution.

Having a central solution with a requirement or user story and the test associated with it gives you full test coverage for manual and automated testing.

Automated Testing Comes in Many Forms.

There are different types of automated testing.

Automated (UI), Regression, and Functional Tests

Most teams will take manual tests and convert them to automated tests, such as UI or regression testing of the application. This can simplify and speed up your testing process. Selenium is just one (of many) types of automated testing.

Continuous Integration Tests

The next level of test automation is continuous integration testing. These tests run on the code or function level to validate that the code functions as design. It could be negative and positive testing (A and B testing). It could also include UI testing frameworks.

Challenges for Testing Teams

There are real problems that testing teams face on a daily basis.

The biggest challenge we see today is increased pace of delivery. Products need to get out to market sooner. And that can cause more bugs to go out into the system.

Having fewer resources in place to deliver on these tests puts strain on your development and testing teams.

If you let bugs get into the market, there’s a larger cost to fix defects later on. Engineers have to fix them and run them through another testing cycle.

There’s also a big disconnect between manual and automated testing. You don’t have a complete view of all of your testing activities. That’s because manual and automated testing are often managed separately.

Reporting is impossible across manual and automated testing without a central view of testing.

It’s difficult to understand what was tested per release or sprint. For many teams, this is a large challenge. It’s not easy to identify what items were in the release and what was tested.

It’s also difficult to identify test failure trends or areas with high impact and high failure rates. This is a challenge from a reporting standpoint.

Many teams use Microsoft Office to manage tests, without a way to gather automated test results.

How to Solve Testing Challenges

You may have testing challenges, but you can solve them. Here are a few ways to do it.

Use Agile and Lean Methods.

Take a step back and look at how you perform these tests. What are your development methodologies? Scrum? Agile? Kanban? Lean?

These methodologies can help you increase pace of delivery — and testing.

Look at Continuous Integration.

Continuous integration can lighten the burden on testing teams. By doing continuous testing, you can improve code quality.

Consider Test Automation.

Automating your tests is a great way to reduce strain on your resources and help them deliver better quality code.

Reduce Technical Debt.

Reduce technical debt by implementing things like continuous integration and test automation.

Centralize Test Management.

It’s important to find a solution in place that can track everything and bring test automation, continuous integration, and Agile/lean methodologies together.

Helix ALM Solves Testing Challenges

Helix ALM is a solution that can cover user stories, epics, and requirements, as well as test cases. You’ll get a single view of all testing activities and testing results. And this includes both manual tests and automated tests.

See How Helix ALM Integrates Testing.

Jump to 12:04 of the recording for a brief demonstration.

Q&A: Test Cases, Integration, and More…

How do you handle two successive failed test cases? Would they be considered two separate issues?

In this instance, we would create a second failed test run. But you can update the script to be smart and identify that a failure has been logged. In that case, it will not be logged again. This would be up to you to determine how to handle it.

How much effort does it take to integrate manual testing in Helix ALM and input results of manual tests?

Helix ALM supports integrating manual testing activities out of the box. Helix ALM also makes the task of adding, editing, and entering results for testers fast and easy. So, the effort needed is small versus something like copying and pasting from Microsoft Excel or Word.

Does Helix ALM allow you to automatically generate a test plan based on an area affected and associated test cases?

Helix ALM will have this functionality in full later this year. You can only use some of these capabilities right now.

Does Helix ALM integrate with Ranorex?

Yes. Helix ALM allows integration into any test automation platform. This includes Ranorex, as well as other test automation tools, such as Selenium, TestComplete, and Appium.

My team uses JUnit. Is it supported?

Yes. Helix ALM can integrate with any type of unit testing framework, including JUnit for Java or NUnit for .NET. It will also work with continuous integration frameworks, such as Jenkins.

Can Helix ALM integrate with Jira or Bitbucket, too?

Yes, Helix ALM has an out-of-the-box integration with Jira. You can import items from Jira into Helix ALM. And you can use the REST API to integrate with Bitbucket.

Do you need a separate license to integrate testing with Helix ALM?

No. As long as you have a license for Helix ALM, you can integrate your testing processes.

Integrate Testing with Helix ALM

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