Strategies to Optimize Automated Tests Execution Time

Testing is creating and developing an application and putting it through its paces frequently until you get the desired result. It is a vital part of the application development cycle to ensure that the application is as good as it was intended to be.

The testing process has become more advanced and an essential part of the application development process. Utilizing automation testing eases the tester’s job, speeds up the process, and ensures quality by providing clear and accurate results.

In this article, we will be learning some best practices to optimize automation test coverage. But before we move it is important to have a brief introduction of what automation testing is? What benefits does it provide? And the best time to start automating.

Introduction to automation testing

Automation testing is the process of testing an application to ensure that it is up to its strict requirements which means the application is exactly what it was designed to do. It’s a test to double-check for bugs, defects, and any other issues that arise with application development.

Even though some types of testing, like regression or functional testing, can be done manually, testing manually requires a lot of time and resources. Doing it automatically serves greater benefits, and significantly reduces testing time by testing quickly, more frequently, and efficiently, thus improving overall functionality.

Automation ensures more accurate and reliable results than manual testing. It benefits application development as it makes way for continuous development. Perfecting the final application to put out, enables the developers to design and work on more applications efficiently, and create new ones.

Benefits of automation testing

Automation testing has many benefits; here are some of the biggest benefits

• The scripted sequences in automation provide quick and detailed reporting that would not be possible if done manually and in a shorter amount of time.
• Testing an application is mainly to detect bugs and other issues. Automation testing makes this process easier.
• The Automation test scripts can be reused thus Simplifying the testing routine.
• Automation testing can be run at any time of the day without needing human intervention, thus reducing the risk of human error.                                                      
• Machines speed up human work. Hence automated testing Speeds up the testing process and ensures high-quality results with improved accuracy.
• Testing is time-consuming but automation saves time as well as money. It may require an initial investment, but later it can be more cost-effective.
• Manual tasks are tedious. Automation enables the testers and developers to divert their time and efforts into other aspects of the application as a result allows them to improve their workflow and productivity.
•  Satisfied employees, faster processing, improved quality, and time savings enable the teams to concentrate on providing better user services, all of these together boost customer satisfaction.

When is the best time you should automate your tests?

But when it comes to quality, automated testing is not always the best way to achieve a fantastic product. However, when done correctly, automation can be the best way to achieve the desired result. You can execute hundreds of tests at a click of a button, with no margin for human error.

So, it is imperative to decide which test cases to automate first. Let’s find out the best time when automation should be done.

• When you are running repetitive and monotonous tests without changing them, then automation would be more efficient.
• When there is a possibility of human error and tests can lead to failure automated testing can improve the quality and deliver a well-tested application that can be re-tested from time to time.
• When there is a need to run the tests frequently and cannot be performed manually.
• When Extensive tests require simultaneous and multiple data sets to run. Automation makes it super-fast.
• Tests that need to run on several different platforms

QA engineers often get under the pressure of cutting down the testing time to ensure on-time application releases. Executing fewer test cycles may risk the quality of releases, especially in a setup where there are substantial impressive features. And reducing the test execution time with the growing number of features is difficult. So making an automated test faster is a must.

Every step of your application testing process like planning, designing, and executing can help you achieve efficient, and faster test execution. However, there are different ways that you can take to better prepare, execute and maintain your test cases with wider test coverage and deliver a faster and better user experience.

Here we will be exploring some tips to consider for optimizing your test execution time while creating a successful test automation plan.

Choosing the right tool for automation

Every application and every test environment is uniquely unique. There are different automation test tools available in the market. So it is important to select a combination of automation tools and frameworks right for your needs. Optimizing the best tool that suits your specific goals, will not only speed up testing but also reduces maintenance cost and difficulty.

It is also important to consider certain aspects like understanding of the market, the programming language you’re using, types of tests to be run, devices, targeted platform, OS, performance, and security while choosing a tool for automation. For example, running cross-browser testing, considering a clous-based testing platform like LambdaTest is ideal.

It is also important for the teams to select tools that support the programming languages that QAs are skilled and comfortable with, while also meeting the needs of the application being tested.

Planning for an  Effective Automation

Every QA process must begin with a clear definition of the application goals and the key elements that deliver them. Enhancing automation test coverage begins with an understanding of the elements that can be automated and elements that must be handled by manual testing.

After identifying the tests to be automated, prioritizing test cases is a must. Once having a strong test suite in place, you can start to automate your tests. This will enable you to save time and money, and helps to ensure that your tests are running consistently and accurately.

If you want to automate testing process to achieve faster application release and provide a seamless user experience, you can leverage automated testing tools like LambdaTest. It guarantees you accurate and useful test results and ensures that you deliver a high-quality application to the users. LambdaTest offers automated testing with various test automation frameworks like Selenium, Cypress, Playwright, Appium, Espresso and XCUITest.

LambdaTest is a secure and reliable, cloud-based platform that provides testing in real environments. Its real device cloud allows choosing from more than 3000 real devices and browsers for running automated and manual tests for both websites and mobile apps.

Cloud testing on LambdaTest enables your team to test anytime, from anywhere. The cloud also provides integrations with popular CI/CD tools such as Jira, Jenkins, and much more. Additionally, there are in-built debugging tools that let you identify and resolve bugs immediately. LambdaTest also facilitates instant, hassle-free parallel testing with maximum test coverage.

Creating a robust test suite

Effective test automation relies on building a powerful and comprehensive test suite. The test suite should cover maximum aspects of the application with fewer test cases to enhance both quality and speed. The aspect of the application must include its functionality, usability, performance, and security.

The test suite must include test cases validating higher-risk areas of code. It must also include validation for customer-centric features and critical business workflows.

Use Functional Automation tools that can create multi-purpose scripts that should run on Desktop, Web, and Mobile devices, and also on multiple browsers like Chrome, Edge, Safari or any others required.

Keep your tests suites valuable but short

Shorter tests are much faster and easier to maintain at scale, as they focus on just one piece of application functionality at a time. Longer tests take a longer time to run as they assess multiple pieces of functionality.  One of the best practices for a better and faster automation experience is creating and running atomic tests. They Improve test execution time and flakiness.

Hence when the aim is to optimize run time and improve test quality, it is better to write separate tests, each specifically focussing on one piece of functionality.

Using bug tracking notification

Make debugging and collaboration easier by using built-in debugging options offered by your cloud-based platform. This will help in isolating bugs and their causes easily.

You can Maximize testing and debugging efficiency by setting up alerting, monitoring, and bug tracking with real-time notifications to notify you when a test/build fails

Test on the right browsers

Just like prioritizing your test cases based on critical aspects of your application. It is equally important to emphasize the operating systems and browsers of greatest user significance.

Each browser and its versions have different ways of rendering your website to end-users. To cover these differences, plan your automation suite so that you can execute test scripts on multiple platforms and browsers regularly, and ensure that the final application is in line with market usage and trends.

Parallel Test Execution

Running tests concurrently over multiple machines in parallel, instead of sequentially leads to faster builds and reduces test execution time. That’s why running tests in parallel is another component of any strategy to reduce test run times. You can examine the test suites that take a longer time to execute and look for opportunities to run those tests in parallel.

Improving and organizing new suites with different features and running them in parallel enables quick identification of the problem. Hence you could run more tests more frequently and optimize test run time

Virtual machines and cloud computing services like LambdaTest help in automatically setting up environments and deploying your code to run tests in parallel.

Conclusion

A successful Test Automation strategy increases the reliability and speed of test execution which is crucial for any application. Following the above-mentioned strategies for optimizing test automation will help you to speed up test execution and get the best out of your efforts.