A company goes through many stages of software development when creating a program, a mobile app, or a full-featured system. And the last thing you want to do in such a process is encountering numerous errors. That’s why testing plays a crucial role in the creation of a product.

Testing is the final stage of website and software development. It answers three critical questions:

  • Does the product match the original idea?
  • Does everything work as it should?
  • What should you do to positively answer the first two questions?

Testing or quality assurance (QA) is an ongoing and streamlined process that helps test engineers know whether the software they created meets precise requirements. In short, testing “ensures” the superior quality of any IT product.

There are two different kinds of testing—manual and automated. In the first case, quality control is performed by QA engineers (or testers) by simulating a user’s actions.

automated QA testing vs manual QA testing
Source: Mobilunity

In the second case, launching, initialization, execution, analysis, and results are performed automatically with the help of special tools. The tester processes the results.

Automated application testing is the process of validating software, which includes performing basic functions and test moves:

  • Launch
  • Initiate
  • Execute
  • Analyze
  • Deliver results

Automated testing is the counterpart of manual functional testing, which is performed by a robot program rather than a human.

Why Is Automated QA Testing Necessary?

MarketsAndMarkets forecasts that the worldwide automated testing market will double in size from US$12.6 billion in 2019 to US$28.8 billion by 2024, proving the strong need for test automation.

Modern software are complex multifunctional objects. Manually testing them requires significant labor and time costs. But help comes in the form of test automation tools that improve their quality by enabling engineers to reuse tests when correcting problems with the software. When creating IT solutions, errors are costly, especially in medicine, where human lives depend on software quality. The same is true in banking, where significant financial losses are possible. Automated testing, however, allows you to enable constant verification of product quality.

Interestingly, this particular area is the most gender diverse.

What Are the Benefits of Automation?

Automating software QA tests helps ensure the following:

  • The program does not make mistakes due to inattention or carelessness, something humans are prone to do.
  • You can test at high speed. Performing numerous tests would take a technician a long time. Such checks, meanwhile, can be handled by software in a matter of seconds.
  • Applications automatically create and save test results, regardless of their number.
  • The technician can perform other tasks while automated tests run. Tests may also be run after business hours according to previously scripted scenarios.
  • Automation helps organizations strike a balance. How? Manual checks can be performed on tasks that require human attention. That usually applies to 25% of the total number of cases. Checks for the remaining 75% can be automated.
  • Automation reduces both testing costs and risks associated with human error in the long run.
  • With automation’s help, enterprises get the opportunity to verify the accuracy of the system’s key functions and check for errors. And if there are any, learn what these are and resolve them anytime.

In sum, automation helps users strike a balance between lack of attention and accuracy.

What Are Some Automated Testing Specifics?

Automated QA testing has various components that users (current and potential alike) need to know more about. Some of them are discussed in greater detail below.

Working with Requirements

The QA process begins very early in the software development life cycle among today’s companies—from the requirements analysis stage. Testers review requirements and functional specifications to ensure they are clear, consistent, complete, executable, and testable.

Test Planning

Once testers have understood the requirements, they can begin developing test strategies and planning quality control procedures. At this stage, they determine the scope of work and budget, decide what approach to use at each stage of software development, what types of testing will be required, and what tools are best to use.

Developing Test Scenarios

With a plan in hand, it is time to develop test scenarios or cases, create checklists, prepare the environment for running tests, and create scripts for automated testing.

how does qa testing work
Source: Mobilunity

Software Testing

At this stage, everything is ready to find bugs and defects. A team of QA specialists starts performing various types of tests. The testers report all detected bugs.

Repeat Testing

Once the development team fixes the problem, the testers double-check the functionality and do so-called “regression testing” to ensure that the software still works correctly after changes have been made.

Completing Testing

After all the planned tests are done, and all the fixes are rechecked, it’s time to report the test results. The documentation describes all the tests performed during the software development life cycle.

What Is the Role of DevQAOps in Automated QA Testing?

DevOps teams are responsible for gathering the necessary software business requirements and writing the code. A specific QA team is responsible for testing the code in an offline production environment, and if the code meets the quality requirements, it gets passed onto the next team for future rollout. The deployment crews are then divided into separate teams—those that work with networks and those that work with databases. Every time a program is relayed to a new department, bottlenecks are created. When teams work separately, problems arise, including:

  • The development team is frequently unfamiliar with the QA and operations checkpoints that interfere with the software’s ability to work properly.
  • The QA and operations teams tend to handle multiple functions and have a poor sense of business goals and software worth.
  • Each team may have purposes that conflict with those of others, resulting in lack of efficiency and allowing responsibility to be shifted to colleagues in another department when something goes wrong.

DevQAOps solves these problems by creating cooperative cross-functional groups responsible for serving the software system and making the application ready to run on that system with improved quality and automation feedback.

What Are the Benefits of Having a DevQAOps Expert in Your Team?

Employing a DevQAOps expert ensures the following:

  • Better communication among the various departments that are participating in product development, including Dev, Ops, and QA
  • Uninterrupted combination and ongoing conveyance to provide quicker software releases, timely updates with no issues, and application performance control
  • Better stability, flexibility, reliability, and security of applications

Overall, the world of IT constantly evolves. As a result, new professions and technologies emerge. Combining such areas as QA and DevOps is an inevitable consequence of such changes, notably because DevQAOps can significantly increase a company’s efficiency, among other benefits.

Conclusion

Test automation is needed to relieve people of routine work. The efficiency of automation lies in the completeness of test coverage, clarity and reliability of results, development and support costs, and ease of launching and analyzing results, among others. The main performance indicators are speed, quality coverage, and cost.