Mature Test Automation Quickly with Integrated Functional Testing
Earlier this year, Applause announced Integrated Functional Testing, a groundbreaking solution for development teams that have long been hampered by the silos of manual and automated testing.
Integrated Functional Testing combines both manual and automated testing approaches into one cohesive solution to maximize testing coverage and speed, and accelerate development velocity.
This combined approach enables organizations to access real-world testing from vetted and customized QA teams sourced from Applause’s global community, in addition to capitalizing on the reliability of test automation.
However, as anyone who has developed test automation knows, it takes time, effort and ongoing maintenance to mature the automation to a point where it is robust and stable. Along the way, when test automation fails and there are questions about whether it is a true product failure — or a failure caused by something else — SDETs are usually the ones who manually retest the issue to validate the failure.
As part of Integrated Functional Testing, Applause is introducing a real-time manual retest functionality to address this and make life a little easier for SDETs — and speed up the maturity of test automation. With real-time manual retests, the burden of validating test automation failures shifts to Applause’s testing teams, who can execute the retest quickly.
Here’s how it works and how you can benefit.
Retesting automation failures manually with a QA team in real-time
With Integrated Functional Testing, you can conduct automated and manual tests, and view the results, all through the same dashboard. When an automated test fails, the failure can immediately and easily be sent for a manual retest conducted by vetted and curated testers (based on device and geographic needs) sourced from Applause’s global community.
If the manual test also fails, then you know it’s a true product failure that the engineering team may need to address — and perhaps just as importantly, there’s validation that the test automation is identifying failures correctly.
When an automated test fails, the failure can immediately and easily be sent for a manual retest conducted by vetted and curated testers (based on device and geographic needs) sourced from Applause’s global community.
However, if the manual test passes, you likely do not have a product failure, and there is likely a different issue with the automation (such as issues with the data or locator ID, to name just two possibilities).
This real-time manual retest functionality is unique in the software development space. There is no other way to get manual retests with the click of a button that leverage real-world testers at scale.
The screenshot below showcases how easy it is to manually retest an automation failure. Clicking on the blue button immediately creates a test case that will be executed by an Applause testing team, which will provide screenshots, recordings and logs if needed to better understand issues.
When a automated test fails (as seen in the bottom half of this image), Integrated Functional Testing now enables teams to immediately retest manually to validate if it is a true product failure. In this example, the manual retest showed there was not a true product failure.
Optimizing SDET resources and speeding up automation maturity
When organizations are building up their test automation, an SDET’s time is extremely valuable. There are multiple high-value tasks that SDETs work on as they build automation. For starters, the list of SDET tasks might include:
- Setting up and maintaining test automation frameworks on multiple application platforms (such as mobile, desktop and web)
- Building and maintaining test scenarios and acceptance tests
- Working with deployment teams
With Integrated Functional Testing’s real-time manual retests, the automation failure goes to an Applause testing team for validation, and an SDET is not forced to take on this potentially laborious and time-consuming task. This frees up SDETs to focus on all the other high-value tasks listed above.
With Integrated Functional Testing’s real-time manual retests,an SDET is not forced to take on this potentially laborious and time-consuming task.
By optimizing the SDETs’ resources, organizations speed up the maturity of their test automation. When the SDETs can keep looking forward rather than retesting already completed tests, the path to mature automation becomes less choppy and disjointed.
In addition, the real-time manual retests help organizations continually improve the quality of the automated tests, and ultimately return less false positives. This immediate feedback from Applause’s manual testers results in the ability to improve automation quickly, and speed up the timeline to a stable and robust test automation suite.
If you’re interested in learning more about Integrated Functional Testing and the real-time manual retest functionality, reach out here and we can provide more information on how this could help your team.
