Ten Ways to Radically Simplify Software Testing

By Anil Konur, HuLoop Chief Customer Officer

For many companies, software quality plays a critical role in the success of their business. In today’s business landscape, speed to market can help organizations gain a competitive edge — or put them behind the curve. Fortunately, AI-powered software test automation helps companies radically simplify software testing — resulting in dramatically reduced testing time and faster time-to-market. In this article, we will explore 10 ways your company can radically simplify its software testing process through the use of an AI-powered software test automation platform.

In this agile world of software development, changes and updates are inevitable. However, keeping track of these changes and testing them manually can be time-consuming and error prone. Auto-change detection identifies changes in the software automatically. For example, it can identify what automation should happen on a login screen. When changes are made to the login screen, AI has already recorded what actions should happen on that screen, even if the location or order of action has changed and creates an awareness of the login screen changes. This saves time and prevents surprises during testing.

When running many automated tests, as mentioned above, changes occur and it’s common to encounter intermittent failures due to factors like environmental changes. Auto-healing capabilities automatically handle such failures, attempting to rerun failed tests to ensure accurate results. In addition, auto-healing capabilities fix changes on the fly and doesn’t get hung up on trivial cosmetic changes. By automatically addressing and resolving these issues, auto-healing reduces the manual effort required to troubleshoot and rerun tests, leading to increased efficiency and less maintenance on test scripts.

Historically, companies have had to find, hire, train and retain high-cost, technical employees to develop, deploy and operationalize software testing. However, AI-powered, no-code test automation means that businesses no longer need to depend on software engineers to write automated test scripts. Non-technical employees can easily build automated tests with little to no prior automation experience. No-code automation enables codeless empowerment, meaning that tests can be built on the fly, in a matter of hours — not days — by non-technical workers. Any user that understands the functionality of the system being tested can build automated tests.

Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) are mandatory in today’s software development organizations. Manual repetitive testing can be monotonous, time-consuming, and prone to human error. Test automation software with auto-repeat execution capability can automatically repeat a set of tests as required — defining in the solution that a test needs to be tried a few times before the test is declared “failed” — reducing the burden on your testing team. This feature allows for faster test execution, frees up valuable resources, and ensures consistent and reliable testing outcomes.

In addition, manual bug logging can lead to delays in bug resolution and communication gaps with the development team. Auto-bug logging capabilities automates the process of capturing and logging bugs. It can automatically record relevant information about the failed test, including screenshots, logs, and system information, and log them directly into your bug tracking system. This streamlines the bug reporting process thereby accelerating bug resolution.

As your software applications grow in complexity, executing tests sequentially can significantly slow down your testing cycles. Parallel testing allows you to run multiple tests simultaneously across different environments, browsers, or devices. By leveraging the power of parallel testing, you can significantly reduce test execution time, increase testing coverage, and expedite the delivery of your offering to the market.

Testing software applications with various data sets is crucial to ensure comprehensive coverage and identify potential issues. Data-driven testing capabilities in software test automation platforms enable you to design and execute tests using different datasets automatically. This allows for extensive testing of various scenarios, inputs, and conditions without the need for manual intervention. Data-driven testing enhances test coverage, detects potential defects, and improves overall software quality.

Managing test data efficiently is essential. Test automation software equipped with robust data management capabilities allows you to create, manipulate, maintain and even execute test data easily. In addition, it enables you to generate test data on the fly, import data from external sources and maintain data consistency across test runs. Effective data management ensures accurate and realistic test scenarios, reduces data-related issues, enhances the reliability of your automated tests, and improves execution based on test outcomes.

Test automation software with auto-versioning capabilities can seamlessly handle version-specific tests and configurations. It allows you to define and manage different test scenarios based on software versions, ensuring comprehensive testing coverage across your software ecosystem. In addition, when a test is changed — accidentally or intentionally — the user can go back to the previous versions of the test to restore the needed version. Auto-versioning simplifies the testing process, improves accuracy, and enables efficient management of multiple software versions.

In today’s interconnected world, businesses are often supporting clients and employees around the world. Integrating globalization considerations, such as language, currencies and regulations, into their testing process is a time-consuming, arduous process. For others, it’s not even attainable due to limitations in their testing platforms. Intelligent test automation integrates globalization throughout the testing process, which means that even a single test script can support multiple languages, countries, date formats, currencies and more.

Test automation platforms have typically been specialized in one environment, such as web, mobile, desktop-based, etc. This has meant that organizations have had to both purchase disparate testing platforms and run disparate tests in disparate environments, which required significant time, talent and financial resources. Unified test automation platforms, however, take a uniform testing approach across all environments within a business. A unified test automation platform can simultaneously test across all of a company’s environments, including web, mobile, desktop, integration (API) and database.

With market competition intensifying at a rapid rate, companies must find new ways to bring products to market faster. Incorporating citizen development and intelligent automation into the testing process helps businesses achieve increased testing efficiency, enhanced test coverage, improved product quality and scalability — not to mention cost savings. By utilizing an intelligent test automation platform that injects parallel testing, internationalization and localization, auto-change detection and much more into your testing process, your company can dramatically cut testing time and accelerate time-to-market.

Based in the Sacramento, California area, HuLoop Automation serves enterprises who are digitally transforming their businesses to maximize human productivity and improve customer experience, all while leveraging existing technology investments. HuLoop has built a unified automation platform to help enterprises automate manual, mundane tasks, so their human talent is able to spend time on higher value work. Our AI-based, codeless, Human-in-the-Loop software eliminates mind-numbing work, saving our clients money and improving employee satisfaction. You can learn more at www.huloop.ai and follow HuLoop on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.