Getting started with Automation Testing
Hello Everyone, Welcome to my first article for the Selenium tutorials. In this article, we will cover What is Automation Testing? Why do you need Automation in software development? Different types of tools which are available in the market for Automation and an Introduction to Selenium WebDriver.
What is Automation?
Let us consider a scenario where you have to fill a signup form with some 100 credentials and validate the data in the database, create a report for a pass or fail transactions and take the screenshot of failed validations. Doing it manually is a tiresome, time consuming and repetitive task. But the same thing if you will automate, it can be executed in very less time comparatively and with better quality. So, let us compare Automation with Manual testing.
| Time Consuming and Tedious | Comparatively Fast Execution |
| Massive Investment in Human resources | Less Investment in Human Resources |
| Not Accurate all the time | Accurate all the time |
| Not ideal for regression testing | Ideal for regression testing |
| Once or twice execution | Frequent execution |
| Hard to manage results | Easy to manage results |
| No Programming Language | Some programming language is a must |
Why is Automation used?
- To find defects which are missed in manual testing.
- To ease and reduce the time of execution of regression testing.
- To find quick bugs
- To support the Agile or extreme development process.
- To ease customized reporting.
Advantages of Automation Testing?
To summarise, whatever we discussed above, let us see the main benefits of Automation:
- Cost Reduction
- Reusability
- Faster Execution
- Unattended Execution
- Reliability
- Quality software.
Disadvantages of Automation Testing?
Let us now see the disadvantages of using Automation:
- Automation is not easy; you need to be good at any programming language.
- If something goes wrong in your automation scripts, debugging is not an easy task.
- Complexity in automating complex scenarios.
- Not everything can be automated.
Different Automation tool available in the market:
- HP Quick Test Professional (QTP)
- Selenium WebDriver
- IBM Rational Functional Tester
- Sikuli
- Silk Test
- Test Complete
- Load Runner
- JMeter
- Visual Studio Test Professional.
There are certain famous tools, I mentioned here. Like these, there are hundreds and thousands of tools available in the market.
In this series of Tutorials, we will be learning Selenium WebDriver Automation tool. It is an open source tool, used for automating the web-based application, have lots of online community support available, can be automated in any programming language, support all the key vendors of browsers and many more advantages.
In the next article (Introduction to Selenium and its components), we will cover topics like how selenium started, advantages of using Selenium automation tool, different components of selenium, the different version of selenium and much more.
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