In today’s hyper-competitive cloud economy, it’s more important than ever to be first to market to gain a competitive edge. This makes organizations prefer modern software development techniques like continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), which enables faster innovation, over the traditional waterfall approach to building software.
Automated testing is an integral part of the continuous delivery pipeline. However, despite the acknowledged benefits of automated testing, the reality is that most organizations still rely heavily on outdated, manual testing processes. The initial effort required to set up a test automation process makes teams want to avoid the pain, and make do with manual testing. However, to benefit from CI/CD, it’s important to use the right technical approach to automated testing, as well as the right test automation solution.
The right approach involves knowing which tests to automate, and which to continue manually. Test automation scales the process to larger projects, and allows the team to cope with changes along the way. When selecting the right test automation tool, organizations are faced with three options: build one in-house, leverage an open source tool, or buy a commercial tool.
Among open source frameworks, Selenium and Appium have emerged as the ideal way to automate testing for web apps and mobile apps – they are official standards, supported by browser and device-makers. However, they can be resource-intensive to set up and maintain in-house. Thus, the ideal test automation tool should be based on Selenium and Appium, but avoid the pain of manual code maintenance.
This white paper aims to help software test and QA engineers and project managers who are considering adopting automated testing but are unsure how to get started. It informs organizations about the benefits of test automation, the right approach to take, and the recommended tools to successfully adopt test automation as part of your CI/CD pipeline.
This paper looks at key obstacles to adopting test automation and how to address them. You'll walk away knowing how to select the right tool, framework & approach for your organization.
