In the 21st century, the Industrial Revolution 4.0 is crowned - this is the era of automation. In recent years, the software field has undergone many changes, from development and testing to continuous delivery. Among them, the software testing process has the most positive changes, especially after automation is introduced into the testing process. This has created opportunities and promoted the development of young talents to become Automation Testers.
1.What is Automation Testing?
Automation Testing is the process of using tools, scripts, and software to execute test cases, by repeating predefined actions. Automation Testing focuses on replacing manual human activity with systems or devices. Because Automation Testing is done through an automation tool, it consumes less time in exploratory tests and is more efficient in maintaining test scripts, while increasing test coverage.
Automation Testing is a process of automatically processing the steps of a test case and is performed by a software called Automation Testing Tool. The purpose of a Tester is to find bugs but the ultimate goal is still to support making the best product.
Automation Testing is best suited for large projects that require repeated testing of the same areas and those that have gone through initial manual testing.
Some of the famous automated testing software today are:
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Quick Test Professional – (HP)
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Ranorex
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Testarchitect – (LogiGear)
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Selenium
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Visual Studio CodedUI Testing
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TestComplete (SmartBear)
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SOAPUI – Web Services Testing (SmartBear)
2.Advantages of Automation Testing
The common form of software testing is Manual Test. For example, to test the login form, a Manual Tester will manually enter the username and password, click "login", see if the login is successful or not. When there is a change in interface or feature, the Tester must retest the previous cases to make sure there are no new bugs. This process takes a lot of time and effort. When the concept of Automation Test was born, the Tester only needed to write a piece of code or use some tools such as Selenium, Test Complete, Jmeter... to automatically run all the steps including inputting information, click, check the results, compare the actual results with the hypothetical results.
Why should we choose Automation Testing?
Reliability: The test runs exactly according to the predetermined procedure, so it will avoid many human-made errors (eg wrong data entry) or when using Manual Testing.
Reusability: Scripts are reusable and you don't need to create new scripts all the time. Tests can be reused across different versions of the application, even with changes to the interface. For example, when producing software, we need to test the product in many environments in turn: test environment, beta environment, production environment. If we run Manual Test, one test case takes one hour, three environments take three hours. But during the product development process, we have to repeat the test process countless times, leading to a loss of time if doing Manual Test. Instead, just write a test script, every time we deploy to a new environment, we just need to change the URL and the test will run automatically.
Iterability: We can test how the software handles (features/performance) when encountering a situation that runs repeatedly on the same test script to help Testers deal with repeated operations such as click, enter data, check results,…). This is also called performance/load testing.
Low cost: If we apply automation testing properly, we can save a lot of costs in terms of time and effort because automation testing is much faster than manual testing, and at the same time, the manpower required to execute and maintain scripts is not much.
High speed: Automation tests help to run tests faster at least 10 times faster than manual testing. If it takes 5 minutes to execute a test case manually, it can only take about 30 seconds to execute automatically.
High comprehensiveness: It can create a test suite to cover all features in the application.
Program more sophisticated tests: It is possible to program more sophisticated tests to get hidden information from the application. At this point, the Manual Test cannot do.
3. Essential skills of an Automation Tester
Understand programming principles, and master at least one programming language: if we want to gradually move into the field of automation, without some basic understanding of programming languages, there is no way for us to write an automation test script logic. Having a little background in programming will not only simplify writing automation test scripts but also help you improve communication with developers. Besides, you can participate in testing in-depth functional tests, after completing unit testing. The requirement for that is to have an understanding of C#, Python, Java, Perl, SQL, XML as well as HTML and CSS code although the language depends on the programming language used by the developers in the project. The Web Automation Engine commonly used in the market today is Selenium WebDriver, which has a combination of Java, C#, Ruby, Python... On the other hand, you can refer to popular scripting languages like VBScript, JavaScript, or Groovy if needed.
Understand the principle of test object recognition: If you do Web Automation Test, you need to understand HTML and XPath.
Master an automation tool: In the Agile era, the focus is on speed and quality. Stakeholders and customers around the world look forward to a place where a bug-free product can be created in a short time. That is the reason why test automation is evolving, and to be a skilled automation tester every company will expect you to know and experience an automation tool.
Deep dive into software design patterns: if you want to delve into a good design framework/common library, you should learn deeply about software design patterns.
Pay attention to the skills of the code: Being an Automation Tester is related to coding, so you need to pay attention to the skills of the code such as debugging, source version control, coding convention, unit testing…
Be eager to learn new things in your profession: for example, the current trend of Automation Testing and software development is integration. It is a closed chain, interacting between development, deploy and test.
4.The potential of Automation Tester in the future
The recruitment demand is very high: Automation Tester is one of the hot and developing professions and a stable profession today, so you are always exposed to the latest technologies and joined in different projects to learn a lot of new and interesting working domains that you don't get bored with. Last but not least, the most special thing is that this is a career with a clear progression path, the more experience you get, the better opportunity you have.
Salary level: The salary of the professional tester is one of the most interesting features to many people. Depending on whether you have English, Japanese and Korean, you can outsource foreign projects, your income will be much higher. If the Tester is good at English, the more opportunities he will have to work at a large software company with foreign outsourcing projects with a huge salary, and even have the opportunity to work in developed countries such as Japan, US, Canada. …
The Tester has no age limitation: It can be seen that for the programming profession the acumen of youth is very important, but for the Tester profession, the experience that has been accumulated for many years is the most important thing. If a Tester is good at English, there are more opportunities to work in large software companies with foreign outsourcing projects with very high salaries.
With the continuous development in the industrial era currently, there is the development of many industries, especially the information technology industry. In recent years, the Automation Tester position is hotter and hotter in many companies. From positions that specialize in tool/framework/library development to those who can write scripts based on a certain Automation Test tool, Automation Testing has been the general trend of the testing industry. With such a general trend indicating future competition, the human resource requirements in this field also require candidates to have better skills in programming, technical, automation skills, etc.
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