Top 10 Test Automation Buzzwords
Buzzwords or technology jargons are the ones dominating the internet world today. You open your browser or a social media page, it’s all over there. Cyberspace is the home of thousands of technology jargons created to impress and attract the younger crowd. Every industry has its potent buzzwords, how can the software testing sector be any behind. As the software testing industry is evolving with powerful additions made regularly, it has given room to interesting buzzwords that had been successful in making heads turn.
Software testing, which was previously a part of the software development process, has now emerged as a separate entity. To increase the reach across various sectors, improve marketing, and attract people for jobs, the testing industry has publicized a few ‘fancy’ words, otherwise known as the buzzwords, to create a lasting impact.
Top buzzwords in test automation
The test automation sector has hyped up a few words to reach their potential audience and explain it in the simplest way. For example, ‘scriptless’ indicated that testing is carried out by automated solutions without writing any scripts. Such buzzwords standardize ‘word’ usage across the industry.
Some of the popular players in the test automation industry are LamdaTest, Eggplant, Yethi, Katalon, Tenjin Online, and Tricentis to name a few. These organizations deal with all/ most of the buzzwords mentioned below. If you would like to get test automation solutions for your new software product, reach out to any of the above-mentioned companies.
Here is a list of the top buzzwords commonly associated with test automation and their brief description.
Codeless Test Automation: Codeless or no-code test automation refers to the process that runs on automated tests, without the tester having to write the code. Codeless test automation has been a revolution in software testing; it has reduced a significant amount of time and cost used by manual testing. Thereby, helping organizations to create a culture of accuracy, precision, and consistency.
Codeless test automation also reduces the overall turn-around-time, while making sure that the product is released faster than before. It is estimated that most of the software development companies have moved towards codeless test automation trends, however, manual testing still remains an integral part of the whole process as it is required for initial setup.
Automated testing: In automated testing, the test case execution is carried out by automated tools, unlike manual testing where test execution is performed manually. Automated testing involves a few key steps that are:
- Selecting the right tool
- Determining the scope of automation
- Planning and design
- Test execution
- Report and analysis
Automated testing reduces cost, time, and effort compared to manual testing.
Regression testing: When a change is made in software, even the smallest modification, it becomes essential to test the entire software to understand the application behavior with the new change. Sometimes, the change incorporated may create a huge deviation from the expected results. Hence, running regression testing is the key to ensuring that the software is working as expected without any technical glitch.
DevOps: DevOps is a multidisciplinary approach that combines software development with IT operations. It improves the software development process by encouraging innovation, improving cross-team collaboration, and using latest technology. DevOps approach helps the organization to create a more agile work process and create unique software with higher quality.
Continuous Integration: Continuous integration is an integral part of the DevOps process that automates the code integration from different team members into a single project. Here, the developers have the privilege to merge their code changes in a central repository from where they are verified by automated builds and run through automated tests.
CI is performed frequently, sometimes it can be run many times in a single day. The frequent integrations help the team to identify the errors quickly and fix them before moving to the next stage of the product development cycle.
Continuous testing: Unlike conventional software testing methods where the testing is performed at the end of the product development, continuous testing starts test execution in the software development pipeline. Here, testing is performed alongside the development, hence, the errors are found earlier in the product development cycle.
Continuous testing helps in tackling the complexity of the DevOps cycle while addressing the associated business risks. It also helps in improving the development/deployment cycle as testing is conducted alongside the development.
Exploratory testing: Exploratory testing also referred to as ‘ad-hoc’ testing is the one that encourages learning test design and execution, in addition to performing completely automated tests. It emphasizes creating innovative solutions by allowing the testers to understand the process and identify defects associated with each test run.
Crowdsourced testing: Crowdsourced testing is the new testing approach by companies to improve the QA process. Crowd testing is performed by a temporary workforce who perform the testing 24/7 to check the effectiveness of the application. This testers’ community is spread across the globe to check based on the geographies too. This is the latest trend in the industry, moving testing beyond the labs and conducting it in real-world scenarios.
Smoke testing: Smoke Testing is performed to check if the deployed build is stable or not. If the build is stable, the QA team can go ahead perform the testing by test automation. Smoke Testing gives a green signal to start the testing; if the build is unstable, it will not provide accurate and consistent results.
AI Testing: As the buzz around Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being witnessed across all major industries, the software testing sector is no different. AI has slowly started in the testing industry to create software of higher quality. In AI testing, the BOTs with AI capabilities will mimic the behavior of the testers as well as the end-users to understand the gaps in the deployed software and identify the errors. It reduces time immensely, saves money, effortlessly tracks defects, and intelligently analyses the end-user behavior. AI is the next big thing in the software testing industry that is going to completely transform operational processes. A glimpse of AI-driven testing has already been witnessed in today’s testing processes, which has shown remarkable results. It’ll be interesting to see AI take over the complete testing process and improve the quality like never before.
If you are a newbie in the industry or someone experienced enthusiastic about learning the new jargon, hope this article was successful in giving a clear understanding of the buzzwords in test automation.
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