How to automate web testing with manual QA team?

April 23 07:58 2018 by Dana Zhezdrina Print This Article

Automation helps to accelerate testing activities, to ensure wider test coverage and to improve quality of the final product. You can apply automation principle to verify mobile and web software. Test automation requires specific skills and means to ensure precise quality assessment. Now I’ll tell you how to automate web testing even having a QA team of only manual testers.

The main aim of web testing is to assist in increasing the number of would-be customers by providing people with a product that meets all the market requirements and satisfies users’ needs and expectations. Web software should provide wide functionality, be well-protected and reliable. Besides, people pay attention to software interface and design. Usability also defines the future of your web software That can be static and dynamic apps, e-commerce solutions, web games, web apps with CMS, websites and so on.

Because of diversity of web software types, there is no universal algorithm for web testing. It depends on the number of factors, e.g., software specifics, use cases, functional logic, etc. In general, the procedure of web testing includes several common steps:

1. Analysis of project specs and requirements
2. Determination of test objectives and test data
3. Preparation of test strategy, cases and user scenarios
4. Execution of test cases
5. Processing of test results
6. Bug reporting

How to start test automation?

Don’t forget that you can automate only a stable system. Before preparing test scripts, you’d better conduct manual testing to make sure a product is ready for automation. If there are too many blockers or changes to be made, probably you cannot run some of ready auto tests, and you may have to rewrite them.

Instead, prepare test cases for manual verification. Run them and analyze the results. Identify what system functionality you can cover with auto tests. You can automate repeated or routine functions and save time instead of testing them manually each time. For example, authorization, registration and user profile. On the basis of software specifics, environment and test scenarios, select the most suitable automation framework. Or you can develop own scripts if you have enough skills.

Applying automation principle, you cannot verify software usability and proper representation of GUI (Graphical User Interface). Only human tester is able to do that. Manual testing is considered to be a traditional approach for web software verification. But in case of complex system, you can automate routine actions or complex calculations and reduce expenses on testing.

Having no coding skills, you can use ready solutions for designing auto tests.

Automation Frameworks

There is a vast diversity of tools and frameworks for test automation. Their main task is to ensure a fast and convenient way for producing automated test scripts. You can use either open-source or commercial solutions. The choice between them depends on several factors, e.g., software type, available budget, and timeframes.

Besides, testing objectives define what tools to use for automation. For example, you can’t use Selenium to automate drag&drop function. For this purpose, we use eggPlant if its fee meets the project budget, as eggPlant is a commercial tool.

Also, we have a specialist who is currently automating Outlook plugin using TestComplete. The tool records scripts automatically, but sometimes we need to edit the scripts manually by extending functionality.

We use Axe by Odin because of its features to record scripts automatically, to store scenarios in Excel and to support test execution using Selenium.

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