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Test Automation Tools - Adventures in QA

How To Select The Right Test Automation Tool

Every software development team or company will come to the point where a test automation tool is needed to downsize the effort of regression testing. The test automation tool can help the tester and the whole team to concentrate on other important testing tasks that a tool can’t handle.

Selecting a tool sounds easy at the first look. Many people will pick the most used tool on the market or the one that supports the programming language of the product. Sure, these are two important factors when selecting a tool, but there is much more to consider when searching and selecting the tool.

Different Types of Test Automation Tools

But where to start? When deciding for a tool, it’s important to know the different types of test automation tools and how the tools are working on a high-level view. Basically, there are five different types of test automation tools on the market:

  1. Image recognition: Tools in this category are taking screenshots of the UI elements in the product. The screenshots will be added to the automation scripts. With the help of the screenshots the application under test will be automated and verified.
  2. Coordinate based recognition: With the help of x/y coordinates, tools in this category are interacting with the application under test to automate and verify the application.
  3. OCR/ text recognition: Optical Character Recognition (OCR) or text recognition tools are able to identify elements based on their given text. The tools use the visible texts to drive the automation and to verify the application.
  4. Native object recognition: Tools that use the native object recognition detect the control or UI elements on their given element tree. In most cases this tree is built by CSS, XPATH or XML to identify, automate and verify the elements.
  5. Capture & Replay: Tools in this category offer a convenient and easy way to record the automated scripts. Every interaction on the screen being it scrolling, tabbing/ clicking or typing will be recorded and translated into automation steps for the tools. The recorded scripts can be used to replay the activities and to verify the application under test.

Some of the available tools on the market support more than one recognition approach. Sometimes this might be useful to combine the approaches in the automation scripts to get more robust automation scripts.

If you want to, how to select the right test automation tool for your team, read my latest blog post at https://blog.testproject.io/2019/03/11/how-to-select-the-right-test-automation-tool/

#HappyTesting

Image Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/t5YUoHW6zRo
Mobile A B Testing - Adventures in QA

How To Run Mobile A/B Testing Experiments?

Imagine you and your team just a released a redesign of the login section of your software product. Shortly after the release you notice that the numbers of newly registered users dropped almost to zero. But why? Is it because the change of the register button to a register link? Or is it the new naming of the register element?

Maybe this kind of changes should have been tested before with an A/B test.

What is A/B Testing?

A/B testing in the context of digital software products gives a team the power to test and compare ideas like in a science experiment with real users. With the help of A/B testing new features or a redesign of an app can be tested against real customers, without letting them know. Almost everything can be tested with an A/B test. For example a color change of UI elements, a change in the navigation pattern, different texts or even whole app sections.
To start with A/B testing it’s recommended to define a strong hypothesis. Read more

Software Testing Trends 2019 - Adventures in QA

Top 5 Latest Trends in Software Testing Industry For 2019

Increasing adoption of methodologies such as DevOps and Agile testing proved to be one of the key software testing trends that was seen in 2018. With the advancements of information technology, the software testing industry is also evolving at a fast pace. Modern software development teams are no longer content with the testing phase of a software to happen as a last-minute affair. With DevOps being adopted by modern day software development teams, here are some of the latest trends in software testing industry that need to be adopted by a QA, tester in 2019 to continue to remain competitive among peers and to stay ahead of the competition.

1. Quality Assurance Will Drive DevOps

The fundamental idea behind DevOps is centered around achieving a seamless and end-to-end collaboration among the QA team, the programmers and other critical teams such as IT and back-end team of a business organization.
A very important portion of the product development is now being handled by the testing team, as developers being increasingly involved in building the application, unit testing, fixing the identified defects and overall maintenance of the application.
This is resulting is a much greater speed of quality assurance. Code deployment is being fueled by DevOps which is ultimately resulting in higher ROI and cost-efficient software testing. Read more

A Beginner's Guide to Mobile Testing - Daniel Knott

A Beginners Guide To Mobile Testing is Live

About a month ago I wrote the following blog post about my mobile testing online course “A Beginners Guide to Mobile Testing” powered by Ministry of Testing. The complete course is now live at https://www.ministryoftesting.com/dojo/series/beginner-s-guide-to-mobile-testing-daniel-knott

In total the course is 1h 30mins long and will teach you the fundamentals of mobile testing. Please take a closer look at my last blog post to get the full picture what the course offers.

If you have any questions about the course let me know or take a look at the club, where you can discuss and share your learnings with other testers. Just follow this link to the club.

A Beginner’s Guide to Mobile Testing – Coming Soon

#HappyTesting

SCRUM - Adventures in QA

What Does Scrum Mean for Companies? And Why Should You Start Learning It Today?

In the past, software products was planned, developed and tested for years until the product was finally released to customers. During the long planning and implementation phases many things can change from the used technology to the customer needs. Due to the changes or problems that need to be handled in later phases, companies lost a lot of money because of the slow and wrong project management approaches.

However, things have changed since the year 2001, when the agile manifesto was introduced to revolutionize software development. The agile manifesto contains 12 principles with a clear focus on the customer, the software delivery, the collaboration inside a team and the outcome rather than processes and documentation.

Now, 18 years later since the agile manifesto was introduced by a group of software developers more than 70% (according to PMI) of all organizations use agile methodologies such as SCRUM and KANBAN.

In this article I want to focus on the agile methodology of SCRUM and why SCRUM matters for you and your company.

With the launch of modern smartphones in 2007 and one year later with mobile app stores, software products are used by their customers from every possible location. Furthermore, the products must serve the users’ needs wherever they are and whenever they want to use it. With the rise of high quality mobile phones and products the expectation from the software increased. Users are way more emotionally attached to their mobile phones and to the software that runs on it.

But what has this example to do with SCRUM? Read more