Software Quality Assurance and Testing Stack Exchange
Software Quality Assurance and Testing Stack Exchange

Questions tagged [automated-testing]

Use for questions involving problems with automated tests. Relevant for designing test automation, debugging test automation, automation tooling questions, and questions about when it is appropriate to automate. Questions regarding specific tools should tag those tools as well.

Introduction

Test Automation is the process of writing software act on the application in test. The classic use of test automation is to use a software framework to execute a defined set of automated tests, usually in the form of a regression test suite.

Other common uses of test automation include performance tests, security scans, automation-assisted penetration testing, automated data generation, fuzz testing, and unit testing.

Use on SQA Stack Exchange

The automated-testing tag is relevant to questions about the design, creation, debugging, execution, and analysis of any test automation. Tools and frameworks used, such as Selenium, HPQC, TestComplete, AutoIT, etc. should be tagged as well.

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Can every test be done by automation?

Can every test be done by automation? Or is there anything that cannot be done by automation?
YOU
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Are your UI automated tests dependent or ordered?

While writing UI automated tests, I've come across situations where test dependency looked like a must. For example, say I have two tests, where the second is dependent on the success of the first. I can add dependency (using TestNG) on the first…
Tarun
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What are good guidelines to determine when to automate a test?

When it comes to test automation, I use a very arbitrary method based on experience that 80% of all tests should be automated. This has worked well in practice, but is based more on "voodo" than science. Should I instead be performing a mini return…
Bruce McLeod
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How do I convince someone who's bought the Record-Playback line that object oriented framework is essential?

Here's the basic setup - over a number of years the testing team at my workplace has developed a sophisticated (probably rather more complex than strictly necessary) object-oriented, data-driven framework for our company's software product (a suite…
Kate Paulk
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How to push people to use automatic tests?

I am a test automation engineer. My main work is to automate UI tests for projects. My tests are suppose to be launch after every release in "qualification", "pre production" and "production". Then, the person in charge (usually the "Product…
BelovedFool
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Can knowing too much about the tested code be a disadvantage?

Shift left testing is an approach in software testing to involve testers into software lifecycle as early as possible. I always understood this as helping in finding conflicting requirements, but also reviewing developer's tests and implementing…
dzieciou
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What is best practice for test failures that have a low priority fix?

If I have a test that fails due to a known bug, but that bug is deemed lower priority to fix than other work, what should be done with the test? I can think of 2 options: Leave the test in the test set. However now every time the test set is run…
danio
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Testing of automated scripts

How much testing of your automated scripts do people generally do? Is it best to treat the automated test suite as a separate project or part of the Agile development cycle of the product your are testing? Being the sole QA person writing and…
Alastair
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Should QA be able to code tests?

Having a development background, I am convinced that record and replay testing tools have their drawbacks, especially by making tests brittle. See Automated Testing != Record-Playback Tool for a good summary: Record-playback scripts are more…
Robert Munteanu
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What are anti-patterns in test automation?

anti-pattern: There must be at least two key elements present to formally distinguish an actual anti-pattern from a simple bad habit, bad practice, or bad idea: A commonly used process, structure or pattern of action that despite initially…
dzieciou
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Testing interactions with external systems

I'm trying to find a way to test the interactions of our platform with external servers, like Twitter, for example. On our online photo sharing application, we have, for example features which let the user publish a content on his/her Twitter feed.…
Alexis Dufrenoy
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Is retrying failed tests good strategy to handle flaky tests?

Like many companies we have flaky tests in our test suites. Google has this problem as well: Unfortunately, across our entire corpus of tests, we see a continual rate of about 1.5% of all test runs reporting a "flaky" result. We define a "flaky"…
dzieciou
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Testing Distributed Systems

I understand and practice most normal testing methodologies, however for systems with several distinct interacting processes testing obviously becomes a lot harder. Unit testing is often not possible, or preventively difficult. I am interested in…
Brian Gianforcaro
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Test Automation for different Locale?

I have begun with automation for a product which is in one language and soon to be ported in another. The only good thing is - Test Automation is just begun. So there are two things which worry me - hard coded Strings (app title, alert messages etc)…
Tarun
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Testing email generation

Some applications generate emails. There may be multiple email formats based on the purpose of the message. The email may be destined for a single individual or a group. It may also be locale-dependent. How do I automate testing that (1) an…
user246
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