Quite confused , why I have chosen this topic to write. Pretty much interestingly this is not about car automation or flight automation. This is completely about Software Testing Automation. What is testing ?? Where it comes ?? why it is so important ???
In software development life cycle, there are various stages in it,
- Area Under investigation
- Feasibility study,
- Dialog Design
- Code Design
Will discuss the other parts later , now comes the testing part. when the sofware comes into the phase of implementation, the next immediate process is to test the software and make sure that, it does not have any bug on that. One who test the software is termed as quality control engineer.
Testing is the stage of the process and check whether the software is stable or not. Under testing, there are two kinds of testing, one is Manual Testing & the second one is Automation. In the former, where all things are manually done. How? For any defined software there will be a flow. That flow will be written as an use case. At the same time, for any flow there will be the functionality which is written as Test Case.
Take a sample case of run a server and connect to the login client. How the usecase will be
1) start the server and connect the server using http://localhost:<port>
2)give the username and password as guest guest and press the submit,
3) check whether it gets redirected to next page .
How the test case will be:
Testcase ID: Description: Status : Expected Result: Result came: Result status
TC_001: start the server. critical server should server started Pass
check whether start
the server has started
So this is what a test case is called. How does automation plays an important role. Automation makes the QC Engineer job easier from writing testcases. Instead of writing 1000’s of testcases manually and testing each and every one of it . So “AUTOMATION” is totally defined as automating the testcases.
Some of my friends are in the automation and they automate the software on its working behaviour. For eg: in the login page there are so many cases to cover such as field blank , password wrong. special characters, and so on. But they are just automating it for correct login credentials alone which is not the good way of automation. It is as simple as they are automating the product and not the testcase.
I would sincerely request all to all the QC Engineers to understand the concept of automation and what automation is all about and how to implement it. Do not just do it in your way.