If your software development lifecycle feels inconsistent and is prone to production bugs, your app is probably a good candidate for automated testing. When you remove manual tests, app development becomes much simpler. That’s because manual tests are bound to miss errors, leading to wasted time and effort from all the back-and-forth between your dev and QA teams.
Below, we’ll explore automated testing in depth and effective strategies for it.
Automated Testing Overview
As mentioned, automated testing removes the manual parts of testing software. This includes tests for infrastructure, source code, and even UI. Writing automated tests does come at a higher upfront cost, but it pays off in the long run for complex apps and high-risk industries like health and finance.
When done correctly, automated tests ensure the following:
- No regressions in functionality: When deploying code, you can be confident that features currently working on your app won’t stop working after a deployment. Your developers will make progress with little worry about leaking issues into production. Additionally, you maintain continuity across all your development environments.
- Faster development: Similarly, changes in your code are verified to be working for both pre-existing and newly added features covered by your written tests. Your team can build and deploy code faster without spending excessive time reviewing it. You also reduce QA time and resources.
Net-net, automated tests help reduce errors that reach production and, as a result, greatly improve the software development cycle.
Automated Testing Strategies for Better App Development
When developing your automated testing programs, consider the following for a better outcome:
- Form a team: One of the most common team structures is to have a dedicated QA (quality assurance) and SDET (software development engineer in test) within your project/organization:
- QA mainly focuses on manual testing. Some parts of the application may require manual testing, such as business logic. The role of QA is to start testing features released by the app development team immediately.
- SDET focuses on supporting the technical side. They design, develop, and maintain all the automated test setups and test cases. They are thorough in designing test cases and must account for critical edge cases that affect functionality. SDET doesn’t necessarily need to be part of a separate/dedicated team; it can be from your app development team. A benefit is that each developer receives faster feedback on their code’s functionality, without having to wait for a separate test team to write tests. We recommend this arrangement whenever possible.
- Maintain test writing momentum: Beyond the initial SDET work, your app development team will constantly build out tests for new features and functionality. It’s important to avoid long breaks between finishing a feature and writing its tests, as this may complicate your SDET team’s ability to understand code. Oftentimes, that means using the same SDET for similar parts of the app, making test coverage more specialized, and shortening development.
- Ensure adequate test coverage from your app development team: Automated tests are a vital tool for any development team. However, it’s not always critical to get 100% of the test automated. We find that 80% of the core functionality is a healthy balance between automated and manual testing.
- Determine when to switch from manual to automated testing: For small projects that are rarely updated after their initial release, you may want to stick with a simpler testing strategy and do everything manually. The effort required to automate testing may not be worth the upfront costs for these smaller projects. Therefore, a cost-benefit analysis is needed to determine the breakeven point (if any) for automated testing of your app.
- Consider the frequency of releases by your app development team: As your project grows or release cycles become more frequent, QA and app development become more time-consuming. You’ll waste a lot of time with manual QA, and at some point, you may even find that it’s impossible to QA manually! If you’re already here, the obvious answer is to switch things over to automated testing.
Executing Automated Testing Successfully
With a solid strategy in place, now comes the hard part. Your development team should consider tools and libraries that can 1) identify gaps in test coverage and 2) simplify writing tests.
The Bottom Line / TLDR
When tackling automated testing, consider your team, test-writing consistency, test coverage, cost-benefit, and deployment frequency when building your own testing strategy.
Unsure whether you’re on the right track? Reach out to our team today for a free consultation. As your test integration partner, we can implement continuous testing into your CI/CD pipeline. We can also set up full CI/CD pipelines in AWS CodePipeline and GitHub Actions, or similar services, to handle full application testing, packaging, and deployment. For websites, we can set up Google SEO and website performance tests using Lighthouse.
