Why Automate Software Regression Testing?

 

At the core of every digital transformation exercise is a software application, which, in consonance with the hardware, runs the system and achieves the desired objectives. However, the software application needs to be updated periodically to address the challenges of the day such as the advent of new technologies or changing customer preferences, among others. Software regression testing helps to identify and assess if the changes made to the software application have met their objectives and/or the changes have created a new issue. For example, a photo-sharing service decides to introduce video compatibility. However, when the new service/feature is implemented, the photo-sharing service takes a hit.

Regression testing is to find out such unintended change(s) and fix it before the software application is released to the customers. Thus, QA regression testing ensures the software application is updated to meet the market/technical/customer requirements and is free of any issues.

Scenarios to conduct software regression testing exercise

There can be scenarios or situations for the QA specialists to conduct regression testing to bring about stability to the software application. The below-mentioned test cases are some of the scenarios that necessitate the conduct of such testing:

·       Complex integration test cases

·       Functionalities to be frequently used by the users

·       Scenarios showing the working of a software application’s core features

·       Functionalities to have undergone some recent changes

·       Boundary value test cases

·       Samples of successful or failed test cases

Why regression testing in software testing be automated?

When changes are made to a software application prior to its release, regressions (resident glitches in a functionality or feature) can get triggered. These can negatively impact the release schedule of the software application and increase the development cost. However, there is one way to accelerate QA regression testing and meet the delivery turnaround time – automation. In fact, manually looking for the unintended changes in the application can be time-consuming and entails engaging the testers for extended periods of time. And since testing in such cases can be repeatable in nature, automated regression testing can reduce the time and effort of testing. Since regression testing checks the functioning of the existing features of a software application, it is important to have the maximum test coverage courtesy an automated regression testing strategy.

Factors to consider while deciding a regression testing strategy

QA specialists should consider the following factors while contemplating the decision to pursue automation in regression testing.

# Is test automation suitable for the project?

Test automation, including when used in regression testing, is not suitable for every project. For example, short-term and small projects such as developing small mobile apps, do not need automation to test regression as the time to write automated test scripts may exceed the total timeframe of the project. Hence, automation in regression testing should be for projects that are of large or medium scale, comprising several sub-systems such as enterprise applications and multi-user gaming software with many releases.

# When to write the automated test scripts?

It is not possible to write scripts for automated regression testing beforehand for the process depends on the manual test cases that have found bugs in the past consistently. Since such manual test cases are not available at the start, testers should proceed with automation when stable software modules are present.

# Which are the tests to be automated first?

Regression test scripts may be developed based on repeatable test cases wherein bugs were found consistently through manual testing. Such tests cover core functions and exceptions like boundary conditions or negative test cases impacting other functional areas of the application.

# Quantum of regression testing to be automated

For most software applications around 70-90% of manual test cases that have detected bugs consistently can be automated. The rest 30% are the manual cases that have detected bugs inconsistently or showed false outcomes.

Pitfalls to consider while conducting automation of software regression testing

Test automation experts should keep the following pitfalls in mind while devising an automated regression testing strategy:

·       Review and maintain regression test suites to ensure the efficiency, accuracy, and speed of testing

·       Do away with false positives generated by automated regression testing suites by verifying the results with a manual smoke test

·       The complexity of automating any regression testing process should not come in the way of its implementation

Conclusion

Since regression testing is crucial to ascertain the proper functioning of existing or old functionalities when changes are made to the application, it is crucial and should not be overlooked. Through automation, any regression testing company can maximize test coverage using a minimal number of test cases thereby saving time and cost significantly. 

Article Original Source:
https://dev.to/

Debunking the Common Regression Testing Myths

With customer experience driving enterprises towards delivering better quality products, they are going the Agile-DevOps way. In this, any product or service needs to be continuously upgraded to meet the changing realities of the day. The realities may include the following:

·       Advent of new technologies that have the potential to increase efficiency, quality, and productivity

·       Changing customer preferences about products or specific features of any product

·       New and better quality products being brought to the table by the competitors

·       The products need to comply with the new security or industry guidelines

·       The products should be workable across devices, browsers, or operating systems, and their updates

Therefore, while in pursuit of Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI and CD) goals as required by Agile and DevOps, the product needs to be updated periodically. While this is a good practice, for it ensures the product remains trendy and technically superior, it can be challenging as well. The updates to one part of the software or the whole software can trigger unlikely changes. These changes can affect the smooth functioning of the software or introduce glitches. So, on one side, the software is updated in consonance with the market or customer demand, on the other, it fails to deliver the best customer experience. To pre-empt such a situation from developing, the QA team performs software regression testing.

What is regression testing?

It is a type of testing that ensures the functionality of an application is not affected by a fix or change made in that application. When a tested software undergoes a fix or update, which does not necessarily affect the whole software, the QA team does not test all the modules. Instead, only a few test cases are executed ensuring adequate test coverage. Any regression testing in software testing can be a fit for test automation due to the overwhelming number of repetitive tests to be conducted.

Benefits of regression testing

QA regression testing accrues a number of benefits for the QA team. These include

·       Ensuring any changes (enhancements or bug fixes) made to the application or a specific module of the application do not affect the tested code

·       Improving the overall quality of the product and making it trendy and customer friendly

·       Reducing the testing time as only a limited area of the software is tested

·       Identifying the bugs or glitches causing the issue and fixing them

·       Helping to implement a Continuous Integration (CI) setup. Here a build triggered by a code is tested automatically in the form of an automated regression testing

Debunking the common myths about regression testing

With time, some myths have gained credence in the minds of QA testers related to regression testing.

Limited testing of functionalities may not be a good idea: Here, instead of testing the already tested codes, only a specific area/feature/functionality of the software is tested. And since the entire software is not tested, the glitches triggered by the fixes or updates in one part of the application may not be identified. This is where the QA specialists need to be meticulous with their planning.

Automation is mandatory to plan any regression testing strategy: Since repeated testing of the already tested code (not the whole application) is done in such type of testing, automation is preferred to save time. However, this does not mean that manual testing can be completely replaced. It is helpful to get a human insight into testing, which automated testing may not always offer. Also, test automation requires proper maintenance of test scripts and test cases lest they deliver the wrong outcome. Further, in cases where quick fixes are needed, manual testing can do the necessary QA regression testing since test automation may take time to setup.

Regression testing lasts long: Any automated regression testing can check and recheck the codes, which no manual checking can accomplish in a reasonable period. Since the scope of testing is small, the testing need not take ages to complete.

Regression testing is not obligatory: This is often put forth by enterprises that give precedence to ‘faster time to market’. However, doing away with regression testing services can backfire as any quick fix to an already tested product can trigger changes elsewhere. And without identifying and fixing those changes (read inclusion of glitches or bugs,) the final product will not be of superior quality.

Conclusion

Notwithstanding the above-mentioned myths, the need for regression testing has become mandatory given the frequent updates received by software applications. It helps QA specialists to do away with any unfavourable changes to the application and delivers the best possible user experience.

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.

Bridging new and old features through Regression Testing

Regression Testing

To remain competitive, companies need to reinvent their products with new features and functionalities from time to time. It is observed that the end consumers are wont to change their preferences for products based on factors like new features, faster loading, cost, and seamless functioning. Hence, the incorporation of the above-mentioned factors can increase the adaptability of the software applications to their end customers. However, the newly added features or changes can trigger changes in the old features, which if not addressed, can impact the user experience adversely. This is where regression testing comes into play, wherein the functioning of the existing or old features is tested. It ensures that the new code additions do not render the existing functions infructuous. A well-planned regression testing strategy investigates the bugs that might creep into any new build inadvertently, while making sure that the previous ones are eliminated.

Remember, any change in a software application can cause unforeseen consequences, thus, adversely affecting the user experience. These unforeseen consequences or side-effects aka regressions can appear in components, features, functionalities, and systems that are not part of the software changes.

 A regression testing exercise flags such regressions or changes and helps the QA team to:

·         Identify and fix the inherent or newly-introduced glitches into the existing system because of the new build.

·         Boost the performance of the software application.

·         Look into any changes to the hosting environment. 

Regression testing can be executed during any of the below mentioned QA tests –

·         Unit Test: In this type of QA testing, the smallest testable components of any application aka units are tested to check if they are performing as expected. Any glitch in the individual components can have a cascading effect on the whole software when the same gets integrated.

·         Integration test: This is unlike the unit test where the integrated groups (a combination of units) or modules of an application are tested in various ways.

·         System test: This follows up from integration testing where the performance and functioning of various components are tested to check how they interact with each other as part of an integrated system.

·         Acceptance test: Since every application needs validation on the litmus test of user acceptability, the acceptance test finds out the degree to which the application addresses the user requirements and gets their approval. This type of testing is named as beta testing, field testing, end-user testing, or application testing. 

Therefore, regression testing in software testing usually takes place at the end of each test cycle. Importantly, it includes unit regression testing where each unit code is validated by rerunning the unit tests. Since regression testing can be repetitive and time consuming, it is often automated to reduce the execution time and free up the testers for other important tasks. 

When do you execute a regression testing strategy?

Whenever a software application is modified by adding, changing, or removing features or functionalities, regression testing is needed to be carried out. Let us understand the same with the following examples. 

Addition of new functionalities:  A software application allows a user to login using their email credentials. However, a new functionality is added wherein the login can be executed using Facebook as well. Here, regression testing would check if the old functionality of logging in with email is working or not.

Any Change Requirement (CR) is implemented: The password option is removed from the login page to facilitate quicker login.

Fixing a defect: In case the login button develops a glitch and is fixed by the developers, the QA team should perform an automated regression testing to check the fixed login button and other associated functionalities are performing as expected.

Fixing a performance issue: In case a slow loading software application is fixed, reducing the load speed from, say, 5 seconds to 2 seconds. So, when the code changes are made to reduce the loading speed, some glitches may enter or old functionalities might get affected. This is where regression testing services can execute the test and pre-empt any glitch from affecting the performance of the application.

Change in the framework or environment: If the database is updated from MySQL to Oracle, the resultant code changes need to be validated to prevent any unforeseen consequences. 

How to go about executing regression testing – manual or automation?

Given the tedium and complexity of such tests, they need to be automated. Since these tests are needed to be executed after every build or deployment, they should be automated to save time and effort. Moreover, running thousands of test cases manually would be practically impossible and can lead to several glitches remaining unchecked. 

 

How to strategize a sound regression testing methodology

The success of any product change depends on the success of its regression testing. Let us find out the steps that QA experts should take in executing a sound regression testing strategy.

·         Monitor any changes in the test cases, which are based on the modifications done on the software application.

·         Analyze the changes (if any) and their impact on the components.

·         Identify the risk prone areas in the test cases.

·         Set priority for the test cases. Select the right automation tool and test environment.

·         Automate test cases and set them for testing.

·         Keep the test suite with the latest test cases. Remove the redundant ones.

·         Execute the tests for different scenarios and dependencies.

Conclusion

Any successful regression testing ensures a software application runs all guns blazing, especially on parameters like speed, accuracy, security, efficiency, and performance. The testing should not be an afterthought but put into practice the moment any new build is initiated.

Check out this case study to find out how Automated Regression Testing helps in the healthcare sector to reduce its Maintenance Costs significantly.

Diya works for Cigniti Technologies, Global Leaders in Independent Quality Engineering & Software Testing Services to be appraised at CMMI-SVC v1.3, Maturity Level 5, and is also ISO 9001:2015 & ISO 27001:2013 certified.