What is Test Infrastructure?
Test Infrastructure refers to tasks, events, activities, and processes that facilitate and support manual and automated testing. Better planned and implemented infrastructure provides stability, reliability, and continuity of testing.
Is Manual Testing Infrastructure slowing you down?
- Anyone spending all day running manual tests will naturally be frustrated by the mundane, repetitive tasks.
- Results are prone to human error.
- Reproducing bugs is much harder.
- Manual testing cannot feasibly keep up with the pace in the modern internet marketplace, which results in low code coverage.
Have you ever wondered about Code Coverage vs Test Coverage?
- It cuts down on developer-QA collaboration because the former are not expected to play any role in QA operations.
Solution
A manual testing infrastructure needs to be upgraded to include automation at multiple levels.
Some examples of tests to be automated are:
- Repetitive actions such as log-ins and OTP entries.
- Tests that need significant time.
- Regression tests.
Read More: Best Practices for Test Automation : Checklist
Make no mistake: the initial stages of setting up automation testing will require research, human effort and financial investment. However, given the narrow timelines in which teams are expected to roll out top-notch software, automation is almost mandatory at this point.
Check out the 10 Test Automation Best Practices to follow
Is Automated Testing Infrastructure slowing you down?
Here’s how automated testing is slowing you down:
Test Environments: If the test environments are not numerous enough to accommodate all testers’ and projects’ needs, tests will be delayed. Solving this will require:
The easy way to scale up is to sign up for a real device cloud for testing. The cloud should provide parallel testing to speed up test results.
Insufficient Automation: It is possible that even though some fundamental tests have been automated, automation has not been adopted across the pipeline. Ideally, the organization should implement a robust CI/CD pipeline to speed up tests, get accurate results and debug.
Do you know how to implement a CI/CD Pipeline?
Non Optimal Strategy: A team can have all the resources in the world, but without a result-oriented, team-aligned automation strategy tailored to the particular industry and project requirements.
Read More: Key Elements of an Effective Test Automation Strategy
Outdated or improperly shaped Test Cases: While test cases should be as reusable as possible, it is wrong to assume that they will never have to be touched again, especially in other projects.
Have a look at the Fundamentals of Writing Good Test Cases to get a sense of some foundational practices.
Here’s how to make your Selenium test cases run faster
Infrastructural Issues: Like manual testing, automated testing will be slowed by inadequacies in infrastructures. A main issue here is:
Insufficient access to real devices and browsers (especially the latest ones) which would prevent software from being tested for cross browser compatibility and cross device compatibility.
Read More: Bug Severity vs Priority in Testing
Solution
Upgrade the automated test infrastructure. Look for cloud infrastructure testing that resolves the issues detailed above, and more.
