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Professionals working in the Technology sector work with extensive Testing tools and techniques for creating and developing a product software and crunching it through phases until they get it right. Automation Testing is a critical part of the product development cycle to ensure the product is delivered with all prescribed requirements. With technological advancement, testing has become more refined and advanced. We have started to utilize automation testing that assists in reducing the workload and provides clear and accurate results.
Important Roles and Responsibilities of Automation Test Engineer
The important roles and responsibilities of professionals working in the field of automation testing are –
- Identify and select the automation test cases
- Apply designs and document the test strategy
- Create an automation test plan
- Automate the design of a framework
- Create, enhance, debug, and run the test cases
- Monitor the defect management process
To understand more, Let us now listen to Mr Palanikumar T who has 10 years of experience in the IT domain on Automation testing tool stack including manual/functional testing. He has been involved in Test planning, development, execution, Defect tracking and Testing metrics. He specialises in Test automation using Selenium Java, and CI/CD tools for DevOps such as Jenkins, JUnit, Maven, Cucumber, Bitbucket and TestNG. He has experience working with Agile, Kanban methodologies and SCRUM Framework.
Q1. What is Automation Testing and Why is it important?
Answer: Automation testing helps speed up the manual testing and general testing process. It takes a lot of effort and dependency on the skills but automation testing helps save time and effort on the required things. It can be run any number of times and increases the efficiency of testing
Q2. What kind of frameworks have you worked with?
Answer: Modular driven framework, keyword-driven framework, behaviour-driven and development framework, and test-driven development framework. These frameworks can be integrated with various threshold efficient tools to give end-to-end scenario automation.
Q3. How do you select a test case for Automation?
Answer: Based on the real-time application, you will have an end-to-end scenario on how to test the applications. By working some amount of time on the application, and figuring out the end-to-end flows, you will start getting some high-level scenarios then from these high-level scenarios, you need to pick up the most important ones that need to be automated and based on that you need to pick the test cases.
Q4. How do you decide which automation tools to use?
Answer: It is necessary to understand the project requirements thoroughly like the type of project ( mobile/web), the scope of the project etc then decide what one needs to automate and what amount of test cases need automation. You can use manual testing at the beginning for this to identify the test cases and then choose the right tool most suitable.
Q5. Which tools are suitable for automation testing for mobile applications?
Answer: For a mobile application or a mobile web browser, we can use Apium with Selenium Java. Apium is one of the tools but we cannot use it for multiple devices so we can use a simulator which the vendor would provide as a perfecto mobile cloud so they provide different sets of mobile devices, different versions of it etc. We can also use other cloud execution engines such as Sauce Labs, LambdaTest, BrowserStack and other vendors.
Q6. Is automation testing making manual testing obsolete?
Answer: This can never happen. Firstly, to automate something you need to understand it, and to understand it, you need to use manual testing. Secondly, it is not possible to automate everything. To automate something, you need to perform manual testing first in parallel a few times to understand the feasibility of the applications, the flow of the applications and other things. Hence, manual testing is evergreen. The opportunities might be less now due to automation but they will always remain relevant. They always go hand in hand and can never be on top of one another. The ultimate aim is to deliver quality applications and they co-exist together.
Q7. How does automation testing integrate with DevOps?
Answer: Nowadays, everyone wants to release their application quickly. For automation testing and other source code integration, you can use Git, Github or Gitlab and other open-source APIs. In paid ones, you can use BigBucket, any customised version of SVN source code repository tools to integrate it. Also, you need to build the application as a deployable component like AJAR. For that, you can use MAVEN for Java and many other build management frameworks available which you can use and choose based on the programming language. There are many test automation tools like Jenkins for CI/CD and continuous integration tools for such integration to be made possible.
Q8. How to automate testing of SOAP and REST web services?
Answer: API testing and web service testing is a growing activities in the software testing area. Earlier it used to be only UI, but now API, database etc can also be automated for testing purposes. SOAP and REST can be automated. For SOAP, we have dedicated SOAP UI automation tools which its parent company gives to its proprietors and there is a free version as well for SOAP UI software. For REST API, you can directly use open REST standards such as REST API Assured for different levels of programming languages like Java, C#, Python etc.
Q9. What are the must learn tools and techniques in Automation testing for freshers?
Answer: Focus on learning programming languages like Java, C#, and Python is a must. Learn Frameworks like UI Automation or API automation support multiple tools. For example, for UI automation, there is Selenium and for API automation, there is REST Assured. I suggest you try the open-source ones first to understand the basics and foundational concepts. There are also other integration elements with the existing frameworks themselves, learn about them. Try to think about all the possible integrations, the real-time scenarios and how to make it most useful to achieve the goal, according to the type of automation you chose like UI or Web or API or Database etc. Consider possible integration and real-time scenarios most useful to achieve the goals. So you can learn Selenium with Java and Jenkins with any development tool GitLab or Github these can be end-to-end combinations. Also, focus on learning test management tools like open-source tools to build real-time project utility to learn concepts.
Q10. How can someone make a career in Automation testing?
Answer: In the case of automation testing, one needs in-depth knowledge which comes over a period of time by working on different types of projects. Try to understand the basics, implement them, and keep practising more. Learn and practice more. Try to work in real-time by building test suites and making runnable automation test tools.
