Most people in the IT and business world agree that software testing is an essential and important part of a business’s overall effectiveness and efficiency. Software testing enables a business to improve their overall quality by targeting defects and troubleshooting problems in their software or web application that might have otherwise been overlooked. Software testing takes a proactive role in a business’s software life cycle as opposed to a reactive one. In addition to identifying problem areas, software testing ensures that technical and business requirements have been met and that results are as expected.
There are two main approaches to software testing - manual and automated. Manual testing is when a person plays the role of an end-user and “tests” all of the features of an application to ensure that it is functioning correctly. Test cases are written in documents and then the tester, through the user interface, enters each step in the test case. With each step, the tester writes whether it passed or failed, further interrupting the flow of the test. Manual testing is repeated several times during a development life cycle for source-code changes and other situations, such as multiple operating environments and hardware configuration. This can often be tedious, time-consuming, expensive, cumbersome and usually full of human error.
Automated testing is “the use of software to control the execution of tests, the comparison of actual outcomes to predicted outcomes, the setting up of test preconditions, and other test control and test reporting functions.” (Test Automation. 2011. .) Once automated tests have been created they can be easily repeated, modified and executed. What would take manual testers hours or days to do can be done in a fraction of the time with automated testing. This is often critical and considered crucial to software development companies, but often times overlooked by organizations due to resource constraints, timelines and cost.
So why is automated testing preferred? Automated testing follows a sequence of steps more quickly than a person and can be run without a person being present. This saves a great deal of time and enables the tester to focus their efforts elsewhere, thereby increasing productivity. Once tests have been created they can be reused many times for regression testing and test-driven development. Not only does automated testing save time and money, but it also increases overall accuracy and test coverage by simulating thousands of users interacting with an application. Additionally, automated software testing bridges the communication gap between developers and testers by, once again, taking a proactive role in detecting bugs and defects. Automated testing test results run by a QA tester, and shared with a developer, saves the developer crucial time and energy that would have otherwise been wasted had they waited to make the fixes at the end of the development life cycle.
