Software development is a rapidly developing field, with the need to create software applications from a high-quality and reliable point of view. Any fresh rollout and new releases of applications, particularly being tested, constantly offer the chance of bugs or little-expected actions that can place the end-user of the application. Thus, the key to successful software application development is regression testing automation. It is the procedure used to see that the original functionality is still operational after coding changes.
The importance of regression testing
Considering the importance of maintaining the quality and stability of software applications, regression testing becomes essential. Its goal is to detect whether new features or bug fixes have caused an error and affected the existing functionality. Without proper regression testing, any new changes can cause undesired outcomes or affect the user, affecting the software product’s reputation.
Automating regression tests
In more advanced testing practices, regression tests can be automated. Automation is the process of writing scripts or programs that can perform certain actions and, in our case, follow test cases without human involvement. These scripts run regularly or in response to certain events such as code updates or releases. This approach saves testing time, eliminates the risk of human error and makes it possible to cover more of the system by consistently running the same tests.
Scalability and efficiency
Developing large and complex software incurs an increase in the number of test cases required. This, in turn, makes it impossible for quality assurance engineers to manually conduct hundreds and thousands of such cases. Automation makes it possible to conduct many test cases in a term that allows keeping up with the speed of software development.
Increased test coverage
Automated regression testing also allows organizations to test on even more systems, configurations, browsers, and so on. In most instances, this would not be achievable without automation. Manual testing would take too much time and likely lead to different human factors’ failures. If automated and integrated into the SDLC, this instance also permits developers to catch issues beforehand and not integrate software systems with severe problems.
Continuous integration and continuous deployment
There are modern software development practices, which allow seamlessly integrating regression testing automation. Once a CI/CD pipeline is set for a given project, automated regression tests can be run with each new code commit or build, detecting if the newly implemented functionalities have broken any of the existing features. All in all, this shortens the feedback loops, and most issues are caught very fast, which makes the debugging and fixing process way less time-consuming and laborious.
Conclusion
Opkey’s AI-powered test automation platform completely reinvents regression testing with a game-changing decrease in costs, effort, and time. No-code testing makes it possible for a non-technical user to modify manual cases to automatic ones in one click. The platform’s pre-built test accelerator repository hosts 30,000+ automatic cases that cover the automation of over 12 ERPs. Furthermore, the change impact analysis report makes it possible for even the least technical user to have a panoramic understanding of how an ERP shift will influence business flows, as it provides a recommendation and prioritization of regression cases. Adding to this, Opkey’s solution to the broken test issue and the self-healing script cut down maintenance chances by more than 80% and development and testing time numerous times.
