There’s a lot of value in stressing the importance of iterative improvement in the software development world. When there are so many things that can be made better, and a host of slight tweaks can result in major performance improvement, it’s vital to keep pushing ahead — and knowing that it doesn’t need to happen in one intimidating leap makes it approachable.
That said, the drawback of iterative improvement isn’t discussed as much as it should be. What am I talking about? Well, think about the game of Jenga. Every time you make a move by removing a block and placing it at the top of the structure, you risk the whole thing collapsing. With iterative improvement, every significant change to your system risks the whole thing.
That’s why regression testing is important. Driven by granular analytics and suitable market research, it allows you to proceed with confidence that you’re paving the way ahead without unintentionally destroying the road behind you (in essence, the core goal is sustainable scaling). But why are updates so risky, what does regression testing (for UI in particular) actually involve, and how can you use it to further your brand? Let’s run through it all.
Imagine that you get version 1 of your website up and running, overcoming various bugs in the beta stage. Everything looks fine, and all the functions operate as they should. You decide to move to version 1.1, and your first point of order is to change the navigation — but when you roll out the change, you realize that your actions have had unforeseen consequences.
The navigation change that you developed happened to conflict with a bug fix that you generated much earlier, and now you see the resurgence of an issue that you thought you’d eradicated. You’re left with two options:
Regression testing, in general, is the process of reviewing software to ensure that it can still do everything it was ever designed to do. Unlike standard testing, it doesn’t test only the latest functions — consider it the equivalent of a full-body physical.
This is essential since software relies on both the new and the familiar, with the basics mattering as much as the freshest and most sophisticated features. When something low-level breaks, it has a cascading effect that disrupts everything around it — and everything built on it.
In practical terms, regression testing involves a host of practical tests based on all the intended functions of a system. For instance, one test may be “Convert a file from format A to format B” using a provided conversion form. Another could be “Return a set of products based on user-selected parameters” using a dynamic filter.
Can these tests be carried out manually? Yes, but they shouldn’t be. Think of how many tests of this kind might apply to a substantial website (hundreds, or even thousands), then think of running through each one for every update (possibly on a weekly basis). It’s precisely the kind of work that should be automated, so it is automated wherever viable.
And what of UI regression testing, specifically? UI regression testing is about the end-user experience. The testing isn’t about internal operations, but about the various ways in which a user might interact with a system. Tasks might be things like “Locate product X from the homepage” or “Submit a support ticket”. Automating this type of testing is all about simulating real-world use cases — interacting with websites and utilities much as people do.
Becoming a top digital brand, and maintaining that position, is all about keeping up with the times: changing the features you offer and the interface you provide to meet shifting standards and stay ahead of the competition. As noted, this produces a heavy testing workload: when you submit your fresh website design, you can’t risk breaking something vital.
That’s why you need to be using batteries of UI tests to check the health of your website’s interface on a regular basis — and this is what CloudQA’s TruBot was designed to accomplish. Needing no programming skills, you can create testing scenarios for bots to carry out. Simply record the test procedure from the perspective of a user, then carry the steps across.
Bear in mind that it’s useful to carry out UI regression testing even if you don’t update your website frequently. This is due to the influence of SaaS and integrations. If one of the platforms or services your website runs on is updated, or a system your website is integrated with breaks (an Instagram UGC feed, for instance, might break following an API update), then you can be left with a UI that doesn’t work correctly.
The more money you have riding on the reliable performance of your website and software, the more important it is that you carry out UI regression testing on a semi-regular basis. The faster you identify problems, the faster you can address them, and the fewer support tickets you’ll need to deal with.
Coding from scratch test after test is expensive, time-consuming and requires acquired skill. Codeless testing enables quick and simple creation of tests. No coding skills are needed. This allows the testers to focus on what they do best: testing.
Regression Testing, by its definition, is a type of software testing to confirm that a recent program or code change has not adversely affected existing features.
DevOps testing automation is the key to achieving the rapid delivery, scalability, security, collaboration, and monitoring that allows today’s agile teams to be highly productive.
As e-commerce is growing, the competition in e-marketplace is also increasing. Nowadays, UX has become the crux of successful e-commerce websites/apps.
Regression testing is an essential component in a web application development cycle. However, it’s often a time-consuming and tedious task in the QA process.
ERP is a very important aspect of any modern. ERP stands for Enterprise Resource Planning. ERP systems allow businesses to achieve a certain level of automation so that they can maintain business operations, finances, and human resource.
Automated Regression Testing ascertains code changes and functionality issues. In other words, it is a quality measurement check to discover if new code complies with the old code so that the remaining unmodified code stays unaffected. Automation regression testing also allows for finding any bugs that may have occurred due to changes in the code and if the testing is not done, the product could have a critical issue occur during a live event which can lead to negative marketing impact.
There are various types of automated regression tests and they include:
It is understood that automated regression testing is hard because for every action performed there is a reaction. A few result in successful tests but there may be another two-hundred that will lead to failure. Unfortunately, there is no one size fits all test strategy for automated regression and shortcuts that are used, have not had consistent positive results. The good news is there are some comprehensive specs, rules and examples that countless software engineers have diligently put together for our knowledge base and application protocol. (Baril, Gounares, & Krajec, 2014)
Automated regression testing’s intent is to speed things up, so we can increase quality and velocity simultaneously which results in obtaining the prize of all promotional tools – being the first to market. It doesn’t matter if you are releasing a new software suite, software feature or even if you wish to make sure a particular software feature is current and working properly, there are steps to take, rules to follow and regression automation tests to conduct. Common practice is to utilize a suite of four regression automation tests which perform in an exemplary manner. They are:
It should be noted automated regression testing not only enables checks into various changes but can also release and prompt testers to conduct manual assessments in the more uncommon cases respective to their unique production environment.
Stakeholders are usually willing to accept automation regression testing as being a part of the final analysis of ‘completion’ for user stories being worked on and evaluated. User stories are only closed when the corresponding automated tests were run effectively and efficiently and had successful outcomes. When the feature is successfully released into production, the regression suite becomes part of the tests. In layman’s terms that means there is a stable version of tests which now exist as part of the regression suite-built layer by layer and are available whenever development of a new feature is added. (Briand, Labiche, & Soccar, 2002)
However, there is a more difficult automated regression test to perform which occurs when a feature was released into production without having any automated tests performed. The challenge then becomes finding a regression suite to put into place since you can only do that incrementally, layer by layer so prioritization is mandatory to ascertain what must be tested.
There are various tools that can be used in automated regression testing which combine testing with functionality in a single platform and a couple of popular ones include Selenium and vTest. However, there is a sidebar that needs to be considered and understood when using automated regression testing tools. The implementation of the tests are faster than manual tests but be cognizant that everything else will take significant time, so preparation is the key. What does that mean? It means that writing the tests and setting up the suite needs must be prioritized, listed and understood. To help save some inefficient use of your time, we have listed some automated regression testing time savers. (Raulamo-Jurvanen, 2017)
Automation regression testing is one of the most important aspects in helping deliver a quality product because it makes sure that any change in the code whether it’s small or large does not affect the existing or old functionality. You can even use automaton to create master data and setup configurations for manual testers which ultimately allows you to facilitate the needs of the various operations within your company or organization. There will be new tests in automation with techniques discovered and challenges to solve. The journey to achieving optimum levels of automation in regression testing must start by taking the first step.
Baril, B. B., Gounares, A. G., & Krajec, R. S. (2014). Automated Regression Testing for Software Applications. Retrieved 10 12, 2018, from http://freepatentsonline.com/9355016.html
Briand, L. C., Labiche, Y., & Soccar, G. (2002). Automating impact analysis and regression test selection based on UML designs. Retrieved 10 14, 2018, from http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1167775
Raulamo-Jurvanen, P. (2017). Decision Support for Selecting Tools for Software Test Automation. ACM Sigsoft Software Engineering Notes, 41(6), 1-5. Retrieved 10 12, 2018, from http://dblp.uni-trier.de/db/journals/sigsoft/sigsoft41.html
Tan, S. H., & Roychoudhury, A. (2015). relifix : automated repair of software regressions. Retrieved 10 16, 2018, from http://dblp.uni-trier.de/db/conf/icse/icse2015-1.html
The Delivery Manager approached the QA Head – When do you stop testing? The Head replied – We never stop testing, it should be continuous we may put a ‘,’ to pause for a while but make sure to pick it again to near perfection. The day, we stop testing, means our product is going to be the history in the market. Even if your product is stable, we need to test it if it works with new browsers, new java version? We need to test it again to see if it could take up a load of new users. We want to deliver quality, and hence Continuity is the key, we do not deliver use-n- throw software.
That’s the power of Continuity!
So how do manage continuity? Is Continuous Agile a tough game? Let’s a take a sneak peek into the best practice’s that could help you gain control of Agile and keep it continuous –
Knowing your customer mindset is of prime importance, just for example if you are testing a bank app – How easy it would be for the user to log in who a layman is? In case he forgets his password, do they have enough information to retrieve his password? Or what kind of information could hacker use to hack the account? Is the password field allowing a ‘copy function’?
Get into the shoes of the customer and then design the test cases/test scripts.
For testing to be Continuous Agile, every piece of code checked in needs to be included in the build. The Build Automation needs to be integrated with Automated Deployments, Test Case Execution, Regression Results and Bug Tracking.
Manual Test Execution is a thing of past! Automate your test cycles to speed up the processes and widen your coverage.
A test suite consisting of some bare minimum test cases in necessary for QA to start on Functional, Regression Testing to ensure the environment stability.
Get in touch with the product owners/business users and try to get the use cases that could be elaborated to test scripts.
What could be critical for a business user? What are the features that for software should work seamlessly and any issues in that could be disastrous? Weigh your features as per the risk associated with them and devise a Risk Based Test Suite. Either you could assign a number from 1-5 [ 1 being lowest and five being highest regarding risk] to your testcases and then could create a suite. Or you can get help from your business users/ top level professionals to assist you with that.
Lean Testing is a concept where the waste is identified at an early stage to maximize quality. Just, for example, your banking app gets a new feature – as a new icon. As a tester now how would you design your test cycle? Does it need to have all the functionality tested or may be few would do? Lean Testing is a process through which you can not only speed up your testexecution but also identify the processes, delays that could hamper your continuous Agile process and provide guidelines for improvement.
Processes are meant to help you achieve faster and transparent results, so it should be a good practice to stick to them. To work on the test execution, you could also take help from the TestPyramid model and based on your risk appetite could work on UnitTesting, UITesting TestAutomation or IntegrationTesting.
Charles Darwin said – “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” Hence, there would be last minute changes, fixes, builds and processes, the important point is you being prepared for it?
You cannot automate exploratory testing but is an integral part of any QA cycle, allocate some time for its manual execution.
Continuous Agile Testing is a process that could provide you with maximum throughput when you are Continuous. As the quote says –
A phased approach to continuous delivery is not only preferable; it’s infinitely more manageable.”
– Maurice Kherlakian.
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