What is Automation Testing? Definition & Test Cases

What is Automation Testing?

Automated testing involves using an automation tool to run a suite of tests. Whereas manual testing is performed by a person sitting in front of a computer, carefully performing all stages of testing.

Automation software is capable of entering test data into the tested system, comparing expected results and the outcome, and generate detailed reports about testing. However, it requires a significant investment of money and resources.

The development cycle requires multiple executions of the same suite of tests during development. Using automation, you can write a test suite and rerun it if needed. Once it is suite automated, there is no need for human intervention. It also helps to improve ROI (return on investment). The goal of automation is not to eliminate manual testing but to reduce the number of tests that need to be run manually.

Reasons Why Automated Testing is Important:

• Manual testing of all work processes, all fields, all negative scenarios is time consuming and expensive.
• It is difficult to manually test multilingual websites.
• Automation does not require human intervention. You can run an unattended test (e.g. at night).
• Automation increases the speed of test execution.
• Automation helps increase test coverage.
• Manual testing can be boring and therefore prone to random errors..
• There are many other benefits of automated testing & pros and cons of testing

Typical Problems that Automated Testing Solves

Let us take a closer look at the problems of automated testing. Conventionally, automated testing can be divided into two parts:

1. Search for an element by a locator
2. Action on the found element.

In the web document, we search by DOM structure, namely X-Path locators or CSS locators. On desktop and mobile, most often the search is carried out by their coordinates. And after the search, we perform an action or test on the found element.

A locator is a path to the element you are looking for in a structure. We work with locators every day, for example, the file system on our computers.

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There are 3 types of file path:

Absolute File Path

1. An absolute file path is the path to the file starting from the disk and indicating all folders. The main advantage is that it includes all the necessary information to find the required file, starting from the parent element (disk) and going through all attachments to the desired file. The disadvantage is that if someone moves the folder, the path will become invalid. In other words, this path includes many values, changing which can affect the path itself.

C: \ Users \ Alex \ Pictures \ test_file.txt

Relative Path

2. The relative path to the file will help to avoid the problems of the previous path, we just need to know where is the folder with the file. The advantage of this path is that it is more protected from moving or renaming folders. Since if we know how to find the required folder, then we will be able to find our file.

Pictures \ test_file.txt

Exact or Short Path

3. The exact or short path allows you to find a file simply by searching by its unique identifier (for example, name). This way is the best. However, you must watch out for name duplicates.

test_file.txt