4 Best Practices for Automating your Regression Tests

To stay in the competition, enterprises need to deliver quality and user-friendly products or services on a consistent basis. While doing so in real-time, they ought to upgrade their deliverables with better features and functionalities possibly without altering the cost. As customer experience becomes the key differentiator for products to being adopted by their target customers, their quality becomes important. The quality needed is in terms of performance, scalability, security, and, to some extent, aesthetics as well. So, how to ensure the changes made to the applications do not end up impacting any other aspect of the same? The answer lies in conducting regression testing. In fact, given the business-critical need for the products to perform well, there has been an urgency to administer regression testing in software testing.

How does regression testing help enterprises?

Modern software applications are huge, cumbersome, and come with a lot of end-point interfaces with third-party applications. These make them vulnerable to the ingress of glitches when changes are introduced. Thus, determining the impact of any minor fix can be a challenge unless, of course, the software is put through automated regression testing. In this type of testing, the core functionality and performance are analyzed to uphold the application’s robustness. Further, regression testing validates performance of the application’s interdependencies.

Notwithstanding the criticality of regression testing in the build-test-deliver pipeline, it is often given short shrift by the powers-that-be. As per the management, retesting the already-tested features and functionalities in a software can be a wasteful, time-consuming, and costly exercise. Let us discuss some other challenges that can be added to this list containing ‘management reluctance’.

Challenges for regression testing services

The slew of challenges impacting the proper execution of regression testing comprises of the following:

Inadequacies of the waterfall way of testing: Enterprises are wont to follow the waterfall way of quality testing where siloed departments, especially QA, may not have the idea of any changes being made in the application. To address the lack of information, testers conduct the full suite of regression testing, often manually. This can take a toll on their time, cost, and effort. However, with the adoption of Agile and DevOps methodologies, everyone is aware of the changes. Hence, testers, instead of running the entire suite of testing, only test the impact of the specific change made in the application.

Costly and highly complex: As this type of testing entails retesting the already tested features and functionalities of an application, it is difficult to justify the cost. The cost can accrue towards allocating resources and tools. Further, since the updates to any software application can be a continuous process given the technology trends and changing customer preferences, the need for maintaining the test cases increases.

Choose appropriate test cases: To make the most of the time and resources allocated towards regression testing, testers should create and execute specific test cases.

Since regression testing in software testing can be a cumbersome and time-consuming activity, it should be automated. In other words, by automating the regression test suites, enterprises can free up resources and relieve them from the drudgery of performing repeated manual testing.

Best practices for automating regression testing

As regression testing for checking the functioning of various aspects of an application is repetitive, automation holds the key to make it quick, efficacious, and cost-effective. The best practices to follow are:

Choose the right test cases: Since running the test covering all aspects of an application through large test suites would belie the very rationale for automation, testers should choose test cases carefully. They should brainstorm as to the specific cases they need to validate rather than going about testing every aspect of an application. Importantly, test the interdependencies that feed the performance of various features and functionalities.

Choose the right tool: Automation testing needs the presence of proper tools that enable the writing of test scripts in any language the tester is comfortable with. The tools can be open-source or premium depending on the extent they can meet the testing objectives.

Train the testers: Even though automation in regression testing can supposedly relieve testers of the drudgery of conducting manual tests, they should have the expertise to write test scripts and run them. So, choose testers who are adept at writing test suits or train the ones who are not yet up the learning curve.

Study user personas: Usually, the features and functionalities that the core group of target users would like to use should be automated. This, when extrapolated, can cover most people’s browsing habits and ensure a superior browsing experience.

Conclusion

Regression testing is a critical requirement to ensure the seamless performance of an application. However, while automating the same, steps should be taken to cover specific aspects of the application that may have a large impact on the user experience.