Most organizations are swiftly adopting automated testing in their software development life cycle. Test cases in automated testing are run without human intervention.
Software Development Life Cycle
Though, not all test cases can be automated, especially when dealing with the salesforce platform. Most automated systems are unable to generate original thoughts.
Automated testing speeds up the testing, which is why it’s considered a perfect replacement for manual testing. In terms of coverage, you can cover more test cases in automated testing compared to manual testing.
The more test cases you can cover within a short period, the earlier the release of new features without affecting the software’s functionality. Thus, adopting Salesforce automation testing will allow team members to focus on the most important tasks and will eliminate the necessity of running repetitive tasks.
Automated testing is less prone to errors because most test cases are created and executed by test automation tools that usually have high accuracy and precision.
Here are some of the test cases that should be automated.
Integration Testing
The software modules are integrated logically and tested as a group in integration testing. Integration testing is primarily used to detect defects in the interaction between the different software modules. It focuses on checking the communication amongst the different modules of the software. There are several approaches to integration testing. You can use the big bang or the incremental approach.
System Testing
System testing is usually performed for the entire application. It’s usually performed to validate the complete and fully integrated software. System testing helps to evaluate the end-to-end system specifications. There are several types of system testing, and they include smoke tests, regression tests and functional tests.
Smoke tests verify the software’s core functionality, while regression tests verify that the new code or features do not alter the application’s existing functionality. Functional tests help to verify that your system is functioning as expected.
Unit Tests
Unit tests are created and run to ensure that each software function works as expected. These tests are easy to automate, and you can use them to test both the expected and unexpected inputs. For unit testing, small software units are individually and independently scrutinized for the proper functioning of different processes. If done correctly, unit testing can be used to detect flaws in code in the early development stages, which is nearly impossible at later stages.
Acceptance Tests
Acceptance testing is the final level of testing for most software. These tests check whether the software product functions as per the user requirements or not. Ensure you select your test cases carefully, as not all acceptance test cases can be automated. Some of the acceptance test cases that can be automated include A/B tests and performance tests.
A/B testing is usually coupled with instrumentation and analysis to help understand how the users can engage with the software product. Performance tests ensure that the backend of the software will function under the expected load from the users.
As stated above, there are test cases that need to be performed manually for quality assurance, and they include.
New Functionalities
You need to supervise the testing closely when testing for the new functionalities in a system. It’s not advisable to perform automated testing for an under-development application. If done, it costs the organization a lot of time and resources to keep all the test cases updated and maintained. The unfortunate thing is that automating testing of new functionalities will constantly fail if you fail to update the changes regularly according to the new system requirements.
Strategic Development
There are specific applications that need special attention and subject matter experience to handle. No one within the organization can handle a strategic development test single-handedly.
You will require a special team of experts to perform this testing manually. Strategic development tests ensure that the most critical parts of the application are tested and working as expected.
Subject Validation
This test protects the validity of different words, initials or statements in a software product. Subject validation also covers inspection and perceived testing. In this case, humans quickly detect and provide feedback about the testing process. If subject validation were to be performed through automation, you would require to write many steps, which is why manual testing is highly appreciated.
User Experience
The success of any software solely depends on its usefulness. When testing the user experience, no approach can compete with manual testing, especially where humans are involved. Testers can detect problems and predict how the application will function by looking at the resolution, language, endurance and formatting. If you were to use an automated testing approach, it would take a lot of time, and thus it’s better to use the manual testing approach.
Conclusion
Automated and manual testing both play a huge role in testing the functionality of software products before releasing them to the users. Some test cases should be performed using automated testing tools, while others can be performed best through a manual approach.
To determine which test case should be automated or performed manually, determine the system and the level of attention needed.
