the mistake is human it is the fact that drives the need for test automation. Because manual testers may not run test cases correctly. There will be many chances to make mistakes. They may provide incorrect input data due to a typo, or they may not correctly notice the actual behavior of the system, or they may not report the test result correctly, or they may miss executing some test cases, or they may forget to execute some preconditions, or they can change the execution sequence of the test case in case the sequence is important.
Another important factor is that the automation test scripts will be used as a way to store the domain/project/task knowledge obtained by the test engineers. Let’s say, for example, if a Tester works on a project for a year, she could have spent more time learning the domain, the purpose of the project, the modules of the project, the flow of all the functionalities. He will be familiar with known problems and challenges.
If this Tester leaves the project, the knowledge acquired by him will also leave.
It is very difficult for the newly joined tester to understand everything in the test case document.
If the automation test scripts are already available, the new Tester can just start the test by running the automation scripts, without gaining much knowledge about the project.
You can understand the flow/data by watching the automation test scripts run. But anyway, you need to get project/domain knowledge to further improve/update automation scripts. So we can say that test automation is a way of storing knowledge.
Automation tool like QTP (Quick Test Professional) has a feature to store screenshots of each and every page browsed during execution. Therefore, it can be used as a test to complete the tests, and we can also refer to the screenshots of previous runs if we need to refer to them.
The test report can be automatically written to a custom report page which will ensure the accuracy of the report and can also improve the appearance of the report.
The very important advantage of automation tests over manual tests is the speed of execution. The test execution can be completed quickly and we can also run the scripts overnight as well without human involvement. Therefore, ultimately, the total time required for testing can be reduced, which will significantly help to complete the project on time. There may be a requirement to do some tests at a specific time. It can be easily achieved by putting the execution of those automation test scripts into an old job/task scheduler. Tool like QTP supports automation object model to achieve this.
Functional test automation scripts will also be useful for performing performance tests. Because many performance testing tools will support reusing/calling these test scripts.
Some types of testing involve comparing a large amount of data between the previous version and the current version as part of regression testing. Practically it may not be possible to do it manually. This problem can be easily solved with a simple shell script or any other script like vbs, wsh.
Because test automation tools support data-driven testing, the test run can be performed repeatedly with many different data sets.
There are many automation test tools available for functional, regression, and performance testing. Test complete, SilkTest, SilkPerformer, QARun, QALoad, TestPartner, WinRunner, LoadRunner, QTP, Rational Robot, and openSTA are some of them. QTP is the most widely used now as it supports vbscript and can be used to test many different applications just by adding the necessary plugins.
