With the continuous growth in the tech industry, agile development has become quite a trend now. The development and testing have to go hand-in-hand as there is an obvious increase in the overall number of builds and releases in every software development process. Thus, testing has now clearly become a very vital part to assure the quality of a software product.
What is Functional Testing?
Let’s quickly enlighten ourselves with what actually this type of testing is. Functional testing, as its name implies, targets the functionality of a system. It makes sure that all the features and functionalities of the system are aligned with the product requirements.
What is Test Automation?
The second question that comes to mind here is what exactly is test automation? Well in very simple words, automating the process of testing is called test automation. This way test suites can be automated and executed with little human interference whenever required. However, one thing to keep in mind here is that test automation aims at reducing the time and human efforts being invested in manual testing and not completely eliminating them.
There are a number of approaches used for the automation of functional testing. Each has its own Pros and Cons and can be best utilized in certain circumstances. Let’s have a brief look at them.
- Record and Playback:
This is the most basic technique used in automation. It enables users to record a number of functional steps and play them again on their application, whenever it is needed. It compares actual results to expected results, that are set by the user, and provides multiple kinds of summary reports. The given data in this technique is mostly hardcoded. However, certain automation tools allow the use of parameterized variables and reading data from files but it still comes with certain limitations. The test suites created using this technique are not really flexible and can break easily when certain additions and/or changes are made into the application. They are not ideal for comprehensive testing as well, rather they suit only small projects that are not expected to last for the long-term. However, record and playback is a fairly simple technique for automation and its easy-to-use structure enables normal people to understand and utilize it effectively.
- Data-Driven Framework:
This framework is another approach used for the automation of applications where a number of functional steps need to be executed again and again with a huge data set. This is ideal when repetitive tests need to be performed against various amounts of data. In this way, a lot of human effort and time is saved that would have been consumed while performing mundane testing tasks.
The test environment in this approach is not hardcoded, thus, it requires knowledge of programming and certain skills to develop test scripts using this framework. This framework comes very handily as it allows the re-usability of created test scripts and offers a good amount of test coverage. - Keyword Driven Framework:
This approach is also known as table-driven or action word based automation testing. This is an advanced technique for automation testing. It focuses on separating the initial stages of the design and development of test scripts from the way they will be executed on the application i.e. test execution stage. Its main idea is to concentrate on the design and the business logic of the application. It is based on exposing very little implementation details and hiding all the technical aspects that are irrelevant to business logic and designs. This technique enables manual testers to write automation scripts as well. But it does not mean that an automation tester isn’t needed. The automation engineers are responsible for setting up the test environment and code structure in this technique. They are also required to work on regular updates and changes related to background automation code.
The keyword-driven technique offers a very good amount of test coverage and is ideal for running comprehensive tests on all kinds of applications but it comes with a good amount of investment in automation tools and resources. Most third-party tools don’t support this framework, thus, automation experts are required to set up the environment for this framework. - Behavior Driven Framework:
Behavior-driven testing is known to be the companion of behavior-driven development. The framework helps in getting rid of complicated scripts. Using this approach, a feature file is first created and then acceptance criteria for each of these features are written in the form of test scenarios. These scenarios are then gotten approved by the business stakeholders. Once approved, only then they are considered to be automated. This framework allows the integration of automation tests at very initial stages in the development process. Cucumber is used in this approach which can execute plain-text functional (feature) specifications as automated tests. The language that Cucumber understands is called Gherkin. - Hybrid Framework:
This approach combines the logic behind a data-driven framework and a keyword-driven framework. It is the most advanced approach to automation testing and allows various advanced features such as the ability to integrate external objects and import/export a number of sources. This approach supports distributed automation testing as well.
Hybrid automation allows testing of very comprehensive applications and covers multiple platforms and environments within an organization. It satisfies all the automation testing requirements of a company and offers usability and reusability of scripts and a very good amount of test coverage. But it requires heavy investment in specialized skills and maintenance costs that make it unideal for small to medium-sized projects.
The above approaches make one thing clear that whatever automation approach one decides to opt for his application totally depends on the size of the application, the amount of testing required, the complexity of the testing required, and his budget.