Test Automation

Overview

Although manual tests may find many defects in a software application, it is a laborious and time consuming process. In addition, it may not be effective in finding certain classes of defects. Test automation is the process of writing a computer program to do testing that would otherwise need to be done manually. Once tests have been automated, they can be run quickly and repeatedly. This is often the most cost effective method for software products that have a long maintenance life, because even minor patches over the lifetime of the application can cause features to break which were working at an earlier point in time.

There are two general approaches to test automation:

Code-driven testing. The public (usually) interfaces to classes, modules or libraries are tested with a variety of input arguments to validate that the results that are returned are correct.

Graphical user interface testing. A testing framework generates user interface events such as keystrokes and mouse clicks, and observes the changes that result in the user interface, to validate that the observable behavior of the program is correct.

Test automation tools can be expensive, and are usually employed in combination with manual testing. Test automation can be made cost-effective in the long term, especially when used repeatedly in regression testing.[citation needed]

In Automation Testing the test Engineer or Software Quality Assurance person should have coding knowledge as they have to write down the test cases in form of code which when run and give output according to checkpoint inserted in it. Checkpoint is the point which is inserted to check any scenario.

One way to generate test cases automatically is model-based testing through use of a model of the system for test case generation but research continues into a variety of alternative methodologies for doing so.[citation needed] In some cases, the model-based approach enables non-technical users to create automated...