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TDD is about writing tests first and everything else second. TDD expedites 100% test coverage and ensures a better bug-free code.

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Developed as an agile development technique in the late 1990s, test-driven development (TDD) presented itself as an ideal solution for limiting bugs, reducing bug-fixing costs, and accelerating software agile software development.

A study by Microsoft and IBM dating back to 2008 pointed out that initial development with TDD incurred 15-35% more development time than conventional techniques. However, the study's authors theorized that TDD pays off in the long term by reducing debugging time and encouraging incremental and iterative development.

Fast forward to today, and TDD is, well and truly, driving agile software development. This article serves as an introduction to what is TDD and how it benefits businesses in end-to-end product development.

An overview of TDD

TDD meaning Test-Driven Development. The most basic premise of TDD is to write a test case for a simple, functional component. This test is generally a failure test of the most straightforward function that requires implementation.

Subsequently, you write the most basic code to accommodate the test case scenario, i.e., pass the test. This way, the code is "refactored" to suffice the required functionality.

This means that TDD supports writing test cases first and adjusting the code accordingly. Thus, in essence, tests drive the code, not the other way around.

The many business benefits of TDD

TDD has grown to a point where it is now a mainstream development practice. It's only natural for businesses to convert to this practice. That said, it helps derive a plethora of business benefits.

A focus on requirements right from the start

As elucidated above, TDD is about writing tests first and everything else second. As a result, this practice helps capturing requirements right at the beginning of the project. This ensures that the code is written in a manner that:

It does not contain any underlying assumptions about the critical functional requirements

It entirely focuses on the outlined test case scenario

The coding phase is inevitably much more refined and business-focused with this as a baseline.

Reduced programming sophistication

When serving varying demographics, your application incorporates a certain degree of complexity. And the underlying architecture and code handle this complexity.

But with TDD, such sophistication doesn't come in the way of the test creation process. Moreover, the extensive focus on test cases ensures that the code evolves structurally. It's noteworthy that such orderly evolution in code would also result in a more refined and stable architecture.

Consider this; the developers need to work through a simple process whenever a new function is added:

Write the test case scenario

Prepare the code to pass the test case

Refactor the existing and new code to make it more stable

Documentation for cross-functional teams

Of course, TDD accrues several benefits for both developers and enterprises. But what about documentation? During tests, developers are drawn to the test cases and code in a specific sequence. This ensures that they are focused on their task of writing the most basic code.

But at the same time, all the test cases combined provide a comprehensive description of the feature. Thus, TDD does not require any separate code documentation, at least in terms of what the technical team needs to comprehend the feature.

Naturally, the documentation must be much more consumable for a more layman audience. TDD gives a head start to such teams because of the functional simplicity involved.

Since the documentation is organized right off the bat, it's relatively easier for anyone from the cross-functional team who's joining in to collaborate or perhaps replace someone absent.

On that note, TDD serves to:

Reduce the feedback time from cross-functional teams

Expedite better design and code architecture decisions

Increase the likelihood of delivery of better-quality products

Automation and test coverage

TDD's principle of writing automated test scripts to help drive agile development for quality assurance is a compelling aspect of the practice. The unit tests created through TDD enable much better results for later verification.

Because each unit test leads to code creation and ultimately refactoring, TDD expedites a 100% test coverage. This effectively translates to a better bug-free code. Considering how tough it is to track down bugs and their corresponding fixes, writing such a high coverage of test cases can go a long way in helping the QA team come up with a clean slate.

Rapid change accommodation

Agility, flexibility, scalability, and adaptability are all pretty much the foundations of agile development and the associated TDD. With TDD, developers have thorough knowledge and documentation of each of the specific functionalities that the application must offer.

This goes a long way in refactoring on-demand, i.e., if a new function is added to the application, its corresponding unit test will come into existence. Subsequently, the developer will update the code to pass the test.

As such, TDD helps accommodate any immediate changes or additions required for any of the existing functionalities.

Customer-facing methodology

Nothing's more important than getting the right feedback at the right time. And to make this happen, TDD supports frequent feedback on the development and, on a holistic level, the business needs.

The whole process of writing functional test cases and the resulting refined code is a swift way of getting feedback on the most basic must-have application functionalities.

As a result, each of the hypotheses in building and refining the application is validated right away. It's, thus, safe to assume that the application has a higher chance of eliciting positive feedback from the end-users right off the bat.

In a Nutshell - TDD Cultivates Agile Teams

As seen above, TDD centers itself around the development of automated tests. With the creation of such tests, it's easier for developers to work through a repetitive process.

The resulting automation in this process helps a team focus on the development at hand rather than on the larger technicalities. The focus on the development is further complemented by the team's ownership of the code and its subsequent evolution. This all helps to create a high likelihood that there'll be no bugs or missing features.

Best of all, TDD helps teams evolve around a standard methodology rather than just being a part of the normal development process. In this case, it's up to the developers and businesses to ensure that the functionality and the associated code evolve in an orderly fashion.

GEOSLEY ANDRADES

Director, Product Evangelist at ACCELQ.

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A test case is a series of actions performed on a system to determine whether it meets software requirements and functions properly

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Developed as an agile development technique in the late 1990s, test-driven development (TDD) presented itself as an ideal solution for limiting bugs, reducing bug-fixing costs, and accelerating software agile software development. A study by Microsoft and IBM dating back to 2008 pointed out that initial development with TDD incurred 15-35% more development time than conventional techniques.

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| The Flutter framework is a UI toolkit that helps developers create high-performance, high-fidelity applications for iOS, Android, Linux, Mac, Windows, etc.

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Mobile apps are expected to deliver an improved user experience quickly, efficiently, and effectively. But for mobile app developers, there is always a tradeoff between code lines, functionality, and resources, not to mention the number of platforms and their associated APIs you have to support. Flutter Framework is a complete SDK that powers the narrative against this tradeoff. It is designed to help developers and businesses create mobile, web, and desktop apps using a single codebase for all platforms.

To better reflect upon the advantages of this framework, this article covers the following:

Flutter is a UI framework for creating native mobile apps. It allows developers to build a mobile app using a single codebase while helping quickly build iOS and Android apps. The Flutter framework is a UI toolkit that helps developers create high-performance, high-fidelity applications for iOS, Android, Linux, Mac, Windows, etc. At its core, it lets developers build an application UI using widgets that have different states and react to specific events.

Flutter framework, powered by Dart (programming language), enables maintaining a single codebase for deployment across the platforms mentioned above. This translates to a smooth, responsive application UI across different screen types, aspect ratios, and orientations.

A part of the more extensive Google open-source portfolio of mobile application technologies, the Flutter framework emulates the powers of core languages like Swift, Java, and JavaScript. This way, every application developed appears native to each platform. This creates a smooth app and reduces the time taken for development and maintenance by a significant factor.

Let's understand with an example:

Let's assume that you want to create an eCommerce app. With Flutter, you don't have to consider developing the iOS version the iOS way or the Android version the Android way. Flutter lets you use the same Dart code, libraries, and tools for both platforms. The widgets such as lists, maps, scrolls, and motions work universally on both platforms. They can even be customized, and that's as simple as modifying a variable. Once the code is ready, it doesn't matter whether it's being used for an iPad, an iPhone, or an Android device. However, in the end, it's a Flutter-powered eCommerce app running natively on each platform without any compromise on its functionality.

As for the users, the Flutter framework empowers them with a consistent and customized UI, accelerated performance, and reliable cross-platform support. For instance, an excellent application build on Flutter Framework is - Google Ads.

Flutter's use cases are limitless. From enterprise to education, and across mobile, desktop, and web, Flutter seamlessly empowers everyone to build intuitive applications. Some of the industries that use Flutter include finance, gaming, media, healthcare (predominantly health tracking), Edtech, automotive, eCommerce, etc.

Considering the capabilities it accrues, the Flutter framework is the ideal answer for applications serving the emerging markets. In fact, according to Statista, almost 42% of the software developers have Flutter as their cross-development framework of choice. As of 2022, the companies like eBay, Toyota, Tencent, Dream11, ByteDance, Alibaba, BMW, and of course, Google use the Flutter Framework.

It's noteworthy that all these companies leverage Flutter in different ways.

Few companies use it to improve app development time and limit the engineering effort, while others employ it to improve performance and reliability across different devices. Toyota, for instance, adopted Flutter's Embedder API to refine the user experience and provide for a seamless and responsive development experience.

Before we get into the technicalities of Flutter's prowess, here are some eye-opening statistics:

Clutch's survey reveals that more than 70% of the users expect the onboarding process to be quick (less than 60 seconds). Anything more than that adds to their frustration.

An analysis by Statista elucidating almost a decade (2010 - 2019) illustrates how 25% of the total downloaded apps on the Internet have only been used once. This percentage has remained constant throughout.

AppsFlyer reported that 28% of the applications are uninstalled within the first 30 days of their use. Considering how the industry has grown since then, especially the app stores (Google Play - 3,500,000+ apps, Apple App Store - 2,200,000+ apps) and the number of app downloads, it seems safe to assume that the number of uninstalled apps has only increased.

Indeed, these statistics call for an overhaul of the app development process. For developers and businesses, especially those focused on building network applications with user-friendly interfaces, Flutter comes in handy. Here's how:

Productivity Boost

From instant code generation and debugging to automatic code conversion and multi-faceted widgets, Flutter provides developers with an incredible set of tools to assist them in building fluid and intuitive apps. The hot reload feature is a perfect example of how Flutter brings down the time taken for app development and maintenance by reflecting the changes/modifications made to the UI components in real-time.

Cost Reduction

It's not just the developers who benefit from this single codebase approach. With Flutter, businesses save time and money on the training and maintenance of two or more development teams for different platforms. " Particularly for startups, the value proposition of using Flutter is highly attractive because it solves many of the pain points they face, especially when dealing with limited time and budget to get your software product to market." - Alex Robbio, Forbes.

Robust User Experience

Since Flutter supports the material design, you can ensure of a smooth, native-looking user interface across different devices. Furthermore, as elucidated above, Flutter allows developers to modify the UI elements and customize them to suit the unique features of each device.

Flutter's rich programming language and its great functionalities enable developers to create apps in almost no time. However, as with any other framework, there's always a chance of encountering issues. Therefore, it's paramount to ensure to tackle these issues quickly and effectively.

Consequently, the framework itself catches some of the errors. These issues are typically related to "paint" or "build" phases. Many of the others are checked with Zone Class.

As for testing, automating Flutter testing predominantly ensures an error-free build. Moreover, to increase the likelihood of finding bugs at an early stage. So here are the three testing categories relevant to the Flutter framework:

Unit Test

Unit tests are handy for testing individual classes, subclasses, and interfaces. The unit test verifies the functionality of these entities and makes sure that they work as expected - a job highly relevant to facilitating application scaling or modification.

Widget Test

Widget tests emphasize testing the widgets that are custom-made for a particular purpose. For instance, there are widget tests for handling scrolling, text, and images.

Integration Test

Integration tests would be the ones you will use the most to test your app's functionality. They look at the different modules of your app and their interconnectivity.

Flutter's versatility and simplicity enable developers to create mobile, web, and desktop apps rapidly. Best of all, developers can use it to build cross-platform applications without incurring additional costs.

Besides, Flutter framework saves time, money, and effort by enabling a maintainable codebase. In addition to testing the entire codebase, you can directly automate the tests that rely on the UI element. This way, you can assure that the app works as intended. Moreover, you can spot the errors at the earliest stage.

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What Is Flutter Framework? A Guide to Flutter App Testing

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The Flutter framework is a UI toolkit that helps developers create high-performance, high-fidelity applications for iOS, Android, Linux, Mac, Windows, etc.

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Unit testing addresses isolated tests. Integration testing combines the individual units and tests the validity as a whole

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Consumer demand for digital services has skyrocketed. Digital products necessitate continuous updates and enhancements. A single missed feature or improper code introduced to the software might cause the entire application to fail. Therefore, software testing is paramount.

According to Global Market Insights, the software testing market surpassed $40 billion in 2020, and it'll grow at a CAGR of 7% until 2027. After all, it ensures the quality of digital products and subsequently contributes to customer satisfaction. That's because properly tested applications establish reliability, strengthen security, and boost performance.

However, it's noteworthy that manual testing is no longer sufficient to meet the ever-increasing need for a quick turnaround. To keep up with demand, test automation is thorough-paced. Organizations adopt a multitude of automated tests that effectively lead to improved results.

And when we think of automation testing, unit tests are often the first thing that come to mind. They are, however, not the only ones. Many tools, like Selenium, make integration testing easier by automating defect detection in integrated components.

That said, unit and integration tests have their unique significance, whether manual or automated. This article will explain the distinction between these two forms of testing.

In essence, unit testing verifies logically separable blocks of code. On the other hand, integration testing ensures that all individual test units can work together. Individual members of the team write the code. They test their code independently. The components are then assembled and checked for integrated correctness.

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Difference Between Unit Testing and Integration Testing

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Consumer demand for digital services has skyrocketed. Digital products necessitate continuous updates and enhancements. A single missed feature or improper code introduced to the software might cause the entire application to fail. Therefore, software testing is paramount. According to Global Market Insights, the software testing market surpassed $40 billion in 2020, and it'll grow at a CAGR of 7% until 2027.

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Jenkins is an open-source automation platform that enables a digital application’s continuous development and deployment.

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In today's enterprise world, the question of "What is Jenkins?" would be a regular occurrence. As businesses make ambitious moves to transform into a technology organization, an area of critical interest would be DevOps, particularly, Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (commonly known as CI/CD).

Jenkins holds nearly 71% of the CI/CD market!

Thus, it is natural for enterprise technology teams to be curious about Jenkins or how Jenkins works.

In this blog, we will cover from an enterprise perspective:

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What Is Jenkins in DevOps and The Reasons Behind its Popularity

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In today's enterprise world, the question of "What is Jenkins?" would be a regular occurrence. As businesses make ambitious moves to transform into a technology organization, an area of critical interest would be DevOps, particularly, Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (commonly known as CI/CD). Jenkins holds nearly 71% of the CI/CD market!

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End to End testing, or E2E testing, is a type of software testing that verifies the entire flow of an application from start to finish.

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What is end-to-end testing?

A popular methodology used in the software development lifecycle. End to end testing enables testing teams to test the functionality and performance of a software application by replicating live settings under product-like circumstances. By simulating a real-world scenario, E2E testing validates the system under test and all its sub-systems to ensure they work and behave as expected.

End-to-end testing ensures every operation performed is accurate via the proper communication and integration with underlying components such as hardware, network, databases, and other applications.

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What is End to End Testing - All You Need to Know

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What is end-to-end testing? A popular methodology used in the software development lifecycle. End to end testing enables testing teams to test the functionality and performance of a software application by replicating live settings under product-like circumstances. By simulating a real-world scenario, E2E testing validates the system under test and all its sub-systems to ensure they work and behave as expected.

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BDD (Behavior Driven Development) is a user-driven development process that focuses on the collaboration between business and technical stakeholders.

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What is BDD and why is it needed? Before we answer this question, let's understand a little more about agile.

In Q2 2020, McKinsey exhibited how organizations that adopted agile development methodologies before the pandemic were better equipped to handle the COVID crisis.

93% of these companies reported relatively high customer satisfaction and operational performance amidst the pandemic. 76% also affirmed better employee engagement.

Agile, DevOps, Lean, and other modern methodologies have become the norm for identifying and fixing issues faster and more efficiently. With the current pace of technological development and innovation, businesses can't afford to operate under a traditional waterfall model. However, adopting such methodologies has its logistical challenges, especially when there is no clear definition of what they are.

A recent analysis by Digital.ai has outlined " inconsistencies in processes and practices, cultural clashes, resistance to change " as common hurdles to overcome when transitioning to these methodologies.

Favorably, the answer to these challenges lies in the implementation of behavior-driven development (BDD). This agile software development process/model originated in the early 00s - thanks to Dan North.

In this blog, you will learn

An Overview of BDD

BDD is a user-driven development process that focuses on the collaboration between business and technical stakeholders.

The primary goals of BDD are to:

Deliver software oriented toward solving business problems

Align cross-functional teams, who often have different perspectives

Introduce the use of a shared vocabulary (i.e., a common language)

Promote a thorough understanding of the software's acceptance criteria

Expand the development of automated tests with continuous improvement.

Thus, BDD test entails having profound conversations pertaining to the system's behavior - i.e., how a user will interact with it and how it will behave in different scenarios. Several automated tests are generated and executed based on these conversations to ensure the system acts per the acceptance criteria.

An Example of BDD in Action

Let's assume a scenario for the development of a B2C web application.

The Traditional Process

The product owner lets the idea known to the business analyst.

The business analyst develops the idea into a formal requirements document, or "user story."

The developer picks up the user story, converts the requirements into a full-fledged technological schematic, and begins coding.

The tester picks up the user story, converts it into a test plan, and then begins executing the tests against the developer's code (i.e., the developed feature).

The technical writer converts the test results into technical documentation.

Pitfalls? There's a probability of a massive gap between the business requirements and the final approved code. Additionally, most of the tests may not prove to be comprehensive as they focus on narrow scenarios and don't account for corner cases.

The BDD Process

The product owner and business analyst work together to formulate the feature's requirements. They go through requirements and fill in the blanks regarding the envisioned behavior.

The business analyst, developer, and tester come together to define the acceptance criteria. This criterion is laid out in the form of Gherkin statements, which describe each scenario as a feature/behavior pair.

The developer converts the Gherkin statements into automated tests that can be executed against the system. The result is a concise, comprehensive test suite.

The tester builds on these automated tests to perform exploratory testing that also focuses on the feature's edge cases.

The technical writer converts the test results into a well-documented and thorough project artifact.

With BDD, the application stands a much better chance of being perfectly integrated with the business requirements.

The Many Benefits of BDD

As we've seen above, BDD is the ideal solution for addressing the challenges associated with transitioning to and running an agile development model. To that end, the benefits of BDD include:

Waste Reduction

Because BDD is a user-centric process, it automatically leads to a reduction in the waste associated with traditional methodologies.

BDD allows developers to focus their efforts on critical areas of the system, such as:

Guidance and User Experience

Performance and Security

UI and UX Design

Dependability and Reliability

Coding Standards and Quality Assurance

Faster Product Delivery

BDD is a collaborative model that focuses on user insights - i.e., what the user wants to achieve, and how they will achieve it. Besides, the value proposition of BDD lies in filling the gap between technology and business stakeholders.

Such clarity and concreteness in direction, alongside frequent conversations, product demos, and review sessions, help encourage the early detection and resolution of issues at an early stage of development. As a result, the development team is able to deliver a platform/application with the desired behavior within the stipulated time frame and budget.

Changes in the Workflow and Process

With the introduction of BDD test, the entire workflow and process of a project are remastered. More specifically, there is a shift in responsibility amongst all members. The business analysts, developers, and testers share the same stage throughout the development process.

As such, teams can quickly address feedback and manage changes, saving time in the long run. Moreover, stakeholders can now focus on developing working software instead of spending time writing comprehensive documentation.

Automated Test Case Management and Completeness

Given that BDD focuses on writing automated tests, the overall completeness of applied tests is significantly higher than other development models.

With increased test coverage, there is a reduction in the number of defects as well as the rework required to fix them. Further, the automated tests are sources of feedback ideal for continuous improvement of the quality of software being shipped.

Challenges of BDD

Since we're talking about keeping the entire system behavior in check - i.e., how it acts in various contexts and scenarios - there is always a requirement for utmost engagement across the team. In that light, the commitment and involvement of every stakeholder is a significant challenge for BDD.

If the process is somehow siloed and the stakeholders are not involved in the iterative development process, then BDD may miss out on addressing several issues at the code level. Further, you may end up with an application that doesn't work as expected.

In a Nutshell

BDD is a surefire way to enhance team productivity while also improving the quality of the delivered product. It's a collaborative, user-centric process that enables teams to focus on consistently delivering high-value features.

GEOSLEY ANDRADES

Director, Product Evangelist at ACCELQ.

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What is BDD and why is it needed? Before we answer this question, let's understand a little more about agile. In Q2 2020, McKinsey exhibited how organizations that adopted agile development methodologies before the pandemic were better equipped to handle the COVID crisis.

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Cucumber testing tool is one such framework whose goal is to help unify the development, testing, and documentation of feature specifications for engineers, testers, and analysts alike.

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Back in 2015, Gartner claimed that behavior-driven development (BDD) drove "agility" and increased "collaboration." Fast forward to today, and we're seeing a surge of frameworks and tools that employ BDD to make development and testing more coherent than ever. The Cucumber testing tool is one such framework whose goal is to help unify the development, testing, and documentation of feature specifications for engineers, testers, and analysts alike. In this post, we'll look at Cucumber Framework and how it can help you and your team build better products.

As such, this article covers:

What is Cucumber Framework?

Customarily, BDD is targeted at involving all the major stakeholders of a project in the development and testing process. More so, it's focused on developing test scripts that address technical (developer) and business (customer) needs.

Although BDD has originally sourced from test-driven development (TDD) that tests each component in isolation, it appears to be a more encompassing way to move development forward. That's because it focuses on the system's behavior in its entirety and facilitates efficient communication about the same.

To help implement BDD, one of the most popular open-source tools is Cucumber. It allows for creating higher-level specifications or scenarios that can be run and tested using Gherkin-a natural language programming platform. At their core, these scenarios are written in a human-readable format called Given-When-Then. Here's how:

Given: A customer wants to buy a specific product.

When: Customer enters the required parameters: Product name, the quantity of product, customer location to deliver the product

Then: The customer will see the preview of the product with its price and a button to buy it.

The good thing about the Cucumber testing framework is that it breaks down feature design and implementation into small, manageable steps. It helps identify the best solution for an issue, and if there's no solution, the test is simply broken.

This is how a project becomes less ambiguous and more reliable over time. Besides, the test can be scaled per the needs and understanding exhibited by cross-functional teams.

Advantages of Cucumber Framework

Cucumber automation tool is definitely an efficient testing tool. Cucumber is an exceptionally comprehensive framework that supports BDD in the best way possible. Following are some of its main benefits.

Intuitive Way to Express Requirements in Human-Readable Form

As elucidated above, Cucumber uses Gherkin to test the interaction of business features that help drive your product, such as the scope of an app or web page. Because Gherkin is straightforward to comprehend, you don't have to worry about coding syntax and can focus on translating your requirements into clear, concise sentences.

Essentially, this means that Gherkin (plain English text language) helps construct a standard, understandable test script. It is then viable for catering to different stakeholders (product owners, testers, developers, and business analysts.) These stakeholders can effortlessly maintain and review the script to keep track of project progress and have their perspectives reflected in the results.

The keywords "Given-When-Then" are examples of Gherkin. Other keywords such as And, But, Background, Examples, etc., are also the other examples.

Translating Business Requirements into Testable Scenarios

After translating your business needs into clear, concise sentences, you can go through the files of test scenarios and see what the product owners need. They, in turn, will be able to make modifications and enhancements. This means that the business analysts can take the scenarios and turn them into testable requirements.

Such a practice can help resolve a wide range of questions for every business, such as:

How do you plan to monetize this product?

What happens when a user presses the Buy button?

What happens after the user makes the payment?

How about the delivery of the product?

All in all, a bridge between your business requirement and the technical product is realized, and it helps confirm a solution before it goes live.

Multi-language Support

Unlike other frameworks that support a single language, Cucumber supports multiple languages, including Ruby, Java, JavaScript, Scala, Perl, etc. Originally, Cucumber was built on Ruby. However, now it supports different languages and helps developers write clear, concise tests for variable implementations.

In that light, it overpowers the usability of other tools. You can write tests in a language of your choice without worrying about the tools and platforms you will be using.

The Role of Cucumber in Agile Projects

Agile teams can use Cucumber to ramp up their application development projects (to the next level) since it helps them automate the testing and documentation processes. This is possible due to its ability to accommodate a wide range of stakeholders and create acceptance test cases most intuitively.

Cucumber is also known as one of the best tools for agile development because it helps product managers and business analysts adjust the testable scenarios and the product accordingly. In that light, Cucumber helps reduce ambiguity in scope and design and enhance product quality before the final release.

The Facility of Code Reusability

Cucumber is known for its ability to provide code reuse. This is possible because of the way it generates the Given-When-Then scenarios and how it handles the test case execution. In addition to that, its easy-to-use interface helps reduce the technical barriers to entry.

Reduced development time, increased productivity, and more straightforward maintenance are all the positive outcomes of this. This is precisely what also makes it an end-to-end testing option, especially for complex projects. It can be used not just for the user interface but also for the non-UI parts of your project.

Disadvantages of Cucumber Framework

While Cucumber is excellent in many ways, some limitations do exist.

Gherkin-induced Complexity

No doubt, Gherkin is the cornerstone of Cucumber. But, it can increase complexity by working against succinctly conveying what needs to be conveyed. For something very specific, the generic Gherkin language can be cumbersome and superfluous. Additionally, it accrues technical disadvantages when working with text editors because they don't read its syntax as a regular language.

The Given-When-Then Framework Can be Wasteful

Although the framework is a good way to implement test scenarios, it can be overly verbose, causing redundancy. The fact that such elaboration inside the step definitions is hardly catered to stakeholders renders it utterly wasteful. If only the developers are required to read through them, why not make them precise and fit for purpose?

The Bottom Line

Given the market inclination towards stakeholder inclusion and adherence to software-as-a-service initiatives, Cucumber can help companies improve their products, cut down on implementation time and resources, and scale swiftly. However, Gherkin, which is the cornerstone of Cucumber, can be difficult to use. Text editors cannot read its syntax as a regular language.

If you want an easy-to-use, low-code test automation tool, look at ACCELQ. It is your tool for BDD - it empowers business users by allowing them to write action logic in natural English. See it in action now !

GEOSLEY ANDRADES

Director, Product Evangelist at ACCELQ.

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What is Cucumber Framework? Let's Talk about its Pros & Cons

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Back in 2015, Gartner claimed that behavior-driven development (BDD) drove "agility" and increased "collaboration." Fast forward to today, and we're seeing a surge of frameworks and tools that employ BDD to make development and testing more coherent than ever.

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Salesforce testing enables organizations to use modern salesforce tools to test Salesforce applications. Salesforce automation tools are now on the rise.

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A Beginner's Guide To Salesforce Testing

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Salesforce testing enables organizations to use modern salesforce tools to test Salesforce applications. Salesforce automation tools are now on the rise.

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What is QA Automation? Benefits and Challenges

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QA automation is essentially the process of automating the testing of software applications and mobile apps using automation tools.

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Mobile testing ensures the intended working of mobile applications by manual or test automation tools using various testing frameworks.

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The digital landscape is constantly evolving and quickly moving towards a mobile-centric ecosystem. Mobile devices have become a primary tool for communication, shopping, entertainment, and more. Mobile apps need to offer unmatched functionality and performance - which puts mobile testing into the spotlight.

Businesses need to put mobile testing at the center of their testing strategy in order to maintain a competitive edge. Only then will they be able to cater to today's mobile-savvy audience with confidence.

What is Mobile Testing?

Mobile testing is a software testing type that tests mobile applications for usability, functionality, and performance. Using manual or automated testing tools and techniques, it enables organizations to verify if their mobile applications work as intended and meet the needs of end-users.

There are several types of mobile app testing to ensure that mobile apps meet requirements. They include availability, scalability, functionality, and security.

Let's look at some of them:

Functional testing

It involves testing every function of an app, including user flows and every feature that comprises the user flows. Such testing ensures that the apps function flawlessly, offer a robust user interface, and work seamlessly across different platforms. Functional testing confirms whether app installs, launches and performs with the appropriate functionality. It basically checks if users can easily log in, icons function correctly, and notifications and transactions happen as intended.

Performance testing

It lets testers verify how mobile apps behave in a low or no internet environment and under extra load. It also ensures that the apps function correctly in extreme conditions. Performance testing makes it easy to check the app's load time, battery and memory consumption, speed of data transfer, and recovery capabilities.

Usability testing

It allows testers to test mobile apps for their user-friendliness: from the ease of use to the degree of intuitiveness. Such testing ensures a seamless and bug-free user experience. It involves testing the app with real customers on real devices. Through usability testing, testers check for the layout and design of the mobile app. Also ensuring they are both smooth and visually appealing to end-users and offer a quick response time.

Mobile App Testing is very different from testing a web app. Mobile apps are harder to test primarily because of the various elements that make up today's complex mobile apps. Although testing mobile is similar to web testing in many ways, it also differs across multiple factors:

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What is Mobile testing? The perfect approach

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The digital landscape is constantly evolving and quickly moving towards a mobile-centric ecosystem. Mobile devices have become a primary tool for communication, shopping, entertainment, and more. Mobile apps need to offer unmatched functionality and performance - which puts mobile testing into the spotlight.

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ACCELQ Platinum Sponsor for DevOps Talks Conference 2022

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ACCELQ Platinum Sponsor for DevOps Talks Conference 2022

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ACCELQ Platinum Sponsor for DevOps Talks Conference 2022

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The conference will also have Shriram Krishnan, Vice President - Australia & NZ at ACCELQ, talk about challenges in achieving Continuous Testing of User journeys and a practical guide to setting up a successful Enterprise-wide end-to-end Test Automation practice.

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Release 5.1 brings several features to further ease out test development and test management. ACCELQ Mobile brings support for iOS devices connected to Windows desktops and simplifies the setup by completely eliminating manual steps. Self-healing is overhauled along with major improvements to Test Reports.

Here is the comprehensive listing of key features delivered in Release 5.1.

Test Development

Inline Expression as input for command arguments

"tag" is a selectable attribute in element ID

When defining elements for Web applications, "tag" is now an optional attribute. You may select/de-select "tag" just like any other HTML attribute as part of the Element selector.

Webinar | ACCELQ 5.1 Release

Identifying currently running test case in Action logic

Support for "default" value for global properties

When defining a Global Property whose values are dependent on the Application Environment, you can now provide a "default" value. If a specific value is not provided to one of the environments, this default value is considered. When you have multiple environments and if the value of a Global Property is probably common for a subset of those environments, you can make use of the default value instead of duplicating for each of these environments.

Support for Fixed-width and tabulated files in Action logic

These two capabilities are handy when working with ETL testing.

Mobile Automation

Support for Web Views in Mobile Automation

Web Views are now fully supported in Mobile Automation. This helps execute the tests at much better performance levels and makes it easy to identify elements. The complete suite of Web commands can be used for the elements in the Web Views in mobile automation.

Perfecto and Saucelabs integration for Mobile Automation

ACCELQ Mobile Automate now supports external device providers including Saucelabs and Perfecto. Browserstack support was already available for Mobile in the previous releases.

Your Local Agent on ACCELQ can be pointed to one of these device providers to get seamless remote access to the device lab.

Support for iOS devices on Windows desktops

ACCELQ now supports automation development and test execution on iOS devices connected to Windows desktops. With zero-setup capability, simply connect your device and the system will automatically recognize the device.

Mobile Automation - Zero Setup

Mobile Automation is now possible with zero-setup on ACCELQ, with no manual installation steps involved. Simply plug the device and the rest is automatically taken care of. When installing the Local Agent, be sure to select the Mobile Automation option as well. For the existing Local Agent installations, click on the "Mobile Devices" tab and follow the instructions.

Test Execution and Result Reporting

Ability to choose different device providers for Web vs. Mobile

You can now choose different external device providers for Web and Mobile automation when setting up your Agent. This allows the flexibility for the Agent to point to an external device provider for Mobile tests, while the browser tests can run locally on your machine. In addition to ACCELQ Cloud Lab, you can integrate with Browser Stack, Sauce Labs, or Perfect Mobile at this point.

Result Purge is now a Role-based permission

Circle CI support for CI/CD

Completely revamped defect creation flow

Report Statement detailed zoom-in

Test report formatting and display are further enhanced with the introduction of Statement zoom-in. This allows you to explore the full details of a statement while reviewing the test result. This may be helpful while you are troubleshooting a failure or sometimes to understand more about the nature of the logic that was executed as part of the test. You will also find complete details of Self-healing, element-troubleshooting, etc.

Simply click the "info" icon you find on the hover.

Here is an example of the explored statement view.

Comprehensive overhaul of self-healing

Element self-healing is improved significantly in terms of the breadth and accuracy of detection. Several new algorithmic steps are now added to enhance the outcome when an element undergoes changes. Reporting of self-healing activity is also improved to clearly show the underlying change in the application.

When you login to ACCELQ for the first time on this Release, you are prompted to update and resynch the self-healing data. This step thoroughly analyzes your project artifacts to build multi-dimensional seed data. This is only a one-time activity.

Note that you are required to have Project Admin privilege to kick off this process.

Other Enhancements

Screenshots downloaded from the test reports now display the creation timestamp on them. It is helpful to keep the timestamp when sharing the image or attaching it for defect creation.

Performance improvement for Elements under shadow DOM.

Enhanced tooltip as you hover on the View canvas to provide better insights about the hovered element.

Element Debugger is now enhanced to support elements under iframes or under shadow DOM.

Performance improvements when working extremely large pages for View capture

Security fixes

Improved stability in drag/move of DOM tree in Element Explorer

Jira server plugin (ACCELQ-Connect) support for proxy

Fix for specific circumstances where an Agent erroneously might try to register multiple times.

Support grid filtering based on tags

Test Management

All the Navigator grids (Actions, Contexts, Scenarios, and Test Suites) can be now be filtered based on matching tags. As with other filters, tags are also saved across login sessions for each user.

Traceability note for Defect and Requirements Traceability

When establishing Requirements traceability or Defect traceability with a Scenario, you can now maintain an internal note explaining the traceability. This note is not carried over to the target Requirements/Bug tracking system.

Comprehensive Export functionality for test assets

Action grid Owner vs. Origin Context

The Action grid under the Navigator is enhanced for better clarity between Owner Context and Origin Context. Both these columns are now independent. To clarify:

Owner Context: Indicates which Context owns this Action, meaning where the Elements and other called Actions are picked up from

Origin Context: Indicates from which all Contexts is this Action valid.

MAHENDRA ALLADI

Founder & CEO ACCELQ Inc.

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Release 5.1 brings several features to further ease out test development and test management. ACCELQ Mobile brings support for iOS devices connected to Windows desktops and simplifies the setup by completely eliminating manual steps. Self-healing is overhauled along with major improvements to Test Reports. Here is the comprehensive listing of key features delivered in Release 5.1.

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ACCELQ to Discuss Continuous Testing at DevOps Conference; Company Announces Platinum Sponsorship

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ACCELQ to Discuss Continuous Testing at DevOps Conference; Company Announces Platinum Sponsorship

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ACCELQ to Discuss Continuous Testing at DevOps Conference; Company Announces Platinum Sponsorship

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"Australian businesses have been leading the way globally in cloud adoption and DevOps implementation by showing great agility in various aspects of their digital transformation," said Mahendra Alladi, ACCELQ's founder and CEO. "Our Sydney presence has grown significantly with an expanding roster of customers achieving Continuous Delivery.

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Press Release ACCELQ to Unveil ACCELQ Live: A Revolutionary Approach to Quality Engineering for Cloud & Enterprise Apps

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Press Release ACCELQ to Unveil ACCELQ Live: A Revolutionary Approach to Quality Engineering for Cloud & Enterprise Apps

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Platform approach that delivers real-time live release alignment and pre-built reusable automated test assets for enterprise and cloud apps

New marketplace model means software vendors and service providers can easily build and deploy live packages to help accelerate business adoption and quality

First look to come on April 7 at the opening event featuring Salesforce Test Automation in the exclusive event series "Digital Assurance in the world of Cloud Apps"

DALLAS-( BUSINESS WIRE)- ACCELQ, the leading AI-powered continuous test automation platform, today announced the introduction of ACCELQ Live, a revolutionary approach to digital assurance for cloud and enterprise apps..

According to Gartner, businesses' use of low-code and no-code technologies will nearly triple by 2025. ¹ Testing those applications poses unprecedented challenges compared to traditional custom-built apps, and multiple vendor releases and complex technology stacks often prove too much to handle for traditional test automation. ACCELQ Live is built to support this fast-paced development cycle.

"Cloud-based low-code no-code apps like Salesforce, MS Dynamics, Workday, Oracle, etc., have quickly become an industry standard. But test automation of these apps remains a high-code, high-maintenance activity. The technical complexity of these environments - coupled with multiple, interlaced vendor releases - makes traditional automation impossible to sustain," said Mahendra Alladi, ACCELQ's founder and CEO. "ACCELQ Live is a game-changer, making it simple for business users to build and run complex automation tasks in multi-cloud environments. With an innovative next-gen platform backing ACCELQ Live, we have democratized testing of cloud and enterprise apps."

"ACCELQ Live represents a significant leap forward for no-code test automation, speeding digital assurance by as much as 10x," said Guljeet Nagpaul, Chief of Product & Strategy for ACCELQ. "A live cloud link automatically updates automation assets and ensures every software release is always ready for deployment. We bring together an enterprise and cloud app ecosystem of software and service vendors on a marketplace powered by the ACCELQ Live platform."

ACCELQ Live makes test automation accessible to business users through:

Deep vendor and release alignments: Live release alignment with Cloud and Enterprise Apps with built-in support for vendor technology.

Pre-built portable test assets: Codeless automation assets modeled on business processes available via a live link to the cloud.

Multi-cloud integrated end-to-end validation: Instant release alignment of live codeless automation assets in a multi-cloud environment.

Marketplace aggregator for industry's best solutions: Creating a marketplace model where software vendors and service providers can build and deploy live packages.

ACCELQ to Host Digital Assurance in the world of Cloud Apps on April 7
Attendees can get a first look at ACCELQ Live during the season premiere of the company's webinar series, Digital Assurance in the World of Cloud Apps, which debuts April 7, featuring Salesforce Test Automation in this series opener.

The webinar will be hosted by automation testing evangelist Joe Colantonio, with featured guests Julian Joseph (Salesforce Quality Architect at AgentSync and a former Senior Member of Technical Staff at Salesforce) and Regina Garcia (Salesforce Quality Assurance Engineer at AgentSync). Also joining will be Guljeet Nagpaul, ACCELQ's chief of product and strategy, and Michelle Divoky, Technology PMO at Frontier Communications.

For more information about ACCELQ's AI-powered codeless test automation and management platform, please visit accelq.com.

Gartner, "Gartner Says Cloud Will Be the Centerpiece of New Digital Experiences," November 10, 2021.

About ACCELQ

ACCELQ offers AI-powered codeless test automation and management built on a cloud-native platform. ACCELQ provides a unified platform for web, mobile, API, database, and packaged apps. Automation-first, codeless capabilities make it easy to use for testing teams without deep programming expertise. ACCELQ allows businesses to achieve 3x productivity and over 70% savings with its industry-first autonomics-based automation platform. ACCELQ was named a leader in The Forrester WaveTM: Continuous Test Automation Suites, Q2 2020 report. To learn more, visit accelq.com.

Reference: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220405005176/en/ACCELQ-to-Unveil-ACCELQ-Live-A-Revolutionary-Approach-to-Quality-Engineering-for-Cloud-Enterprise-Apps

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Press Release ACCELQ to Unveil ACCELQ Live: A Revolutionary Approach to Quality Engineering for Cloud & Enterprise Apps

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Platform approach that delivers real-time live release alignment and pre-built reusable automated test assets for enterprise and cloud apps New marketplace model means software vendors and service providers can easily build and deploy live packages to help accelerate business adoption and quality First look to come on April 7 at the opening event featuring Salesforce Test Automation in the exclusive event series "Digital Assurance in the world of Cloud Apps" DALLAS-( BUSINESS WIRE)- ACCELQ, the leading AI-powered continuous test automation platform, today announced the introduction of ACCELQ Live, a revolutionary approach to digital assurance for cloud and enterprise apps..

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EuroSTAR, created in 1993 to bring the European testing community together to connect, collaborate, and evolve, will celebrate 30 years in June with their conference.

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ACCELQ onboarded as an official course at UTD

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DALLAS-(BUSINESS WIRE)- ACCELQ, the leading AI-powered, no-code continuous test automation platform, today announced that UT Dallas has adopted the company's platform as part of a new curriculum course. Offered by the Naveen Jindal School of Management, the Digital Consulting Project course introduces students to test automation and test management using an AI-powered no-code platform in the cloud.

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ACCELQ Gold Sponsor for World Tour NYC 2022

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ACCELQ Gold Sponsor for World Tour NYC 2022

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ACCELQ Gold Sponsor for World Tour NYC 2022

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We at ACCELQ, being an official Salesforce ISV partner and on Salesforce App Exchange, are delighted to be back to in-person conferences

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Your test logic may often require entering or validating dates. And most commonly, such dates cannot be hard-coded in the test logic. Instead, you would want to

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ACCELQ Beginner Tutorials 6 | Real world examples Parameterization | How to parameterize date field

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ACCELQ Beginner Tutorials 6 | Real world examples Parameterization | How to parameterize date field

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ACCELQ Beginner Tutorials 6 | Real world examples Parameterization | How to parameterize date field

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ACCELQ Beginner Tutorials 5 | Parameterization | Data Driven testing in ACCELQ

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ACCELQ Beginner Tutorials 5 | Parameterization | Data Driven testing in ACCELQ

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ACCELQ Beginner Tutorials 5  |  Parameterization  |  Data Driven testing in ACCELQ

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A Context represents the state of the application-under-test. In a web-based application, you can consider each page of a web application to be a context.

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ACCELQ Beginner Tutorials 2 | How to create Context in ACCELQ

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ACCELQ Beginner Tutorials 2 | How to create Context in ACCELQ

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ACCELQ Beginner Tutorials 2  |  How to create Context in ACCELQ

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A Scenario in ACCELQ represents the use case you are testing on the application-under-test (AUT). A Scenario comprises a series of “Steps”.A Scenario.

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ACCELQ Beginner Tutorials 4 | How to create a Scenario in ACCELQ

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ACCELQ Beginner Tutorials 4 | How to create a Scenario in ACCELQ

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ACCELQ Beginner Tutorials 4  |  How to create a Scenario in ACCELQ

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AI-powered Codeless Test Automation & Test Management platform on Cloud. Unified platform for Web, Mobile, API, DB, and Packaged Apps.Know more

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ACCELQ Beginner Tutorials 1 | What is ACCELQ Automation with DevOps

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ACCELQ Beginner Tutorials 1 | What is ACCELQ Automation with DevOps

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ACCELQ Beginner Tutorials 1  |  What is ACCELQ Automation with DevOps

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ACCELQ provides comprehensive support for executing and verifying REST API. There isn't much difference in how you set up your action logic for API testing comp

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ACCELQ Beginner Tutorial 9 | How to create Local REST API for Testing

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ACCELQ Beginner Tutorial 9 | How to create Local REST API for Testing

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ACCELQ Beginner Tutorial 9  |  How to create Local REST API for Testing

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ACCELQ Beginner Tutorial 10 | SOAP API Testing

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ACCELQ Beginner Tutorial 10 | SOAP API Testing

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ACCELQ provides comprehensive support for executing and verifying SOAP API. There isn't much difference in how you set up your action logic for API testing compared to UI testing. And you can also develop an Action that includes both UI and API testing together, making possible a fluid end-to-end verification.
Know more at - https://www.accelq.com

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ACCELQ Beginner Tutorial 10  |  SOAP API Testing

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Action represents a particular user activity that is possible in a context. It represents a "verb"- what can be done in a given context. Know more at - https:/

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ACCELQ Beginner Tutorials 3 | How to create Action in ACCELQ

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ACCELQ Beginner Tutorials 3 | How to create Action in ACCELQ

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ACCELQ Beginner Tutorials 3 | How to create Action in ACCELQ

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ACCELQ Beginner Tutorial 8 | How to test REST API

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ACCELQ Beginner Tutorial 8 | How to test REST API

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ACCELQ Beginner Tutorial 8  | How to test REST API

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ACCELQ is one of the most powerful codeless test automation tools for web, desktop, mobile, and mainframe applications that works on natural English coding and have self-healing capabilities. ACCELQ helps the QA teams to automate all aspects of the quality lifecycle from test designing to test planning and execution without the need for programming. The tool automates the Universe-driven test design to maximize the coverage and reusability. The self-heal automation capability, embedded frameworks, and auto test generation help in increasing the efficiency and maintenance of test automation by three times. The video gives an overview of the product and its capabilities.
Know more at - https://www.accelq.com

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By 2024, the software automation testing market will be worth over USD 28.8 billion globally. Selenium will be one of the key contributors to this growth story. So, what is Selenium? Nearly every enterprise with a successful test automation strategy in place for their digital enterprise ecosystem will be aware of the top automation platforms in the market for automation testing. Selenium will occupy the top spot in terms of platform preferences in most cases. However, as with most software platforms, implementing a test automation strategy with Selenium is not without its fair share of challenges. Enterprises need to be aware of these challenges and the means to mitigate them. To know why Selenium testing is successful, it is crucial to understand the challenges in Selenium automation and the best practices to minimize or eliminate challenges.

In this blog, we will cover

Selenium is a popular open-source test automation tool or platform that offers a framework on top of which software testing professionals can build and execute automated test scripts. In addition, Selenium provides an interface that allows the writing of test scripts in various popular programming languages like Ruby, Node JS, Python, Java, C#, PHP, etc.

Selenium testing allows enterprises to validate web applications across different browsers for their functionality and compatibility. Selenium comprises a suite of software tools, each catering to different QA testing needs of an enterprise for their different technology implementations. Once a test script is written in a preferred programming language, Selenium enables its execution on a browser instance in any targeted device like a smartphone or tablet PC or an actual PC. This allows testing teams to save countless hours of testing time, which would have been needed if they had to manually validate every module of an application in an actual run-time environment outside of the development ecosystem. In the absence of Selenium automation, ensuring the quality of a large enterprise application from an end-to-end perspective could take days or weeks to complete.

Despite being a major player in the global automation testing market, the use of Selenium often leads to challenging situations for enterprises. It occurs primarily because of poor strategic planning and a lack of awareness of how to leverage different functionalities of the test automation tool according to unique characteristics of business applications.

Let us explore four key challenges in Selenium automation.

Modern websites are moving away from a multi-page approach and instead are focusing on retaining a single-page version on which different hidden elements are constantly pulled into action dynamically from servers on demand. This can create challenges for test professionals while writing test scripts on Selenium.

Today, more content is consumed on mobile devices worldwide than traditional computer screens. Hence, it is essential to ensure that any web application needs are tested for reliability on mobile OS browsers releasing to the market. Selenium, by default, doesn't offer too much reliability for mobile browser testing for capabilities such as responsive design.

For security reasons, most websites today leverage measures such as captcha to prevent unauthorized bot attacks on different subsections in the webpage. End-users can access them only after they solve the captcha. Additionally, there could be system pop-up messages and notifications that can come up from the operating system side, over which, the Selenium testing environment has little interaction whatsoever. From a testing perspective, this can become challenging as Selenium doesn't have a captcha solving intelligence in its arsenal inherently. It also cannot handle pop-up activities from the underlying OS.

As the application grows in usage and feature additions, the scope and coverage of the testing landscape also increase. While Selenium lets you run test builds in sequence over multiple environments, it may not be very effective as the application size increases. It is important to note that automation of the software testing stage is effective when testers can run as many tests as possible covering all possible scenarios. Hence, scalability issues can impact the overall test quality in the long run.

The challenges mentioned above may seem like a deterrent for enterprises in trusting Selenium for their test automation needs. However, it is easy to eliminate these challenges with the right approach and strategic configurations, and modifications to the Selenium tool. Most businesses do not have this knowledge and, therefore, they are more likely to not succeed in terms of ROI with Selenium automation in their testing landscape. Almost all the challenges mentioned above have workarounds.

The issue of dynamic content loading in web pages as well as pop-up and captcha management can be solved by using wait times, both implicit and explicit, in the Selenium framework. It can pause the test execution till all relevant running conditions are met and satisfactory. As for mobile testing, Selenium has offerings like the Appium that allow developers to test and validate content on native mobile OS browsers and check for their compatibility and responsiveness. Finally, Selenium Grid allows the parallel execution of test cases at any scale to help in resolving scalability issues.

It is important to note that nearly all the challenges in Selenium automation have solutions, and the real problem is the lack of knowledge of enterprises to implement the workaround solution. Selenium testing is one of the most prolific QA innovations. It has made a lasting impact on the way software development standards have improved over the last decade. Having the proper guidance and knowledge on leveraging the various facets of Selenium automation is the real test of faith for enterprises. For this, it is essential to have powerful testing platforms like ACCELQ using which, you can create the most strategic success roadmap for automation testing in your businesses.

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What is Selenium? What are the challenges in Selenium Automation?

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By 2024, the software automation testing market will be worth over USD 28.8 billion globally. Selenium will be one of the key contributors to this growth story. So, what is Selenium? Nearly every enterprise with a successful test automation strategy in place for their digital enterprise ecosystem will be aware of the top automation platforms in the market for automation testing.

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Test automation is a critical pillar of the digital transformation ambitions of today's enterprises. Therefore, enterprise leaders need to know clearly why test automation is essential and about various best practices, test automation frameworks, and the challenges in test automation.

To succeed in the digital economy, it is not only necessary to roll out software faster, but it is equally essential to assure that the software is vetted for quality.

Studies estimate that by 2026, there will be a USD 49.9 billion worth of market for automation testing globally.

In this blog, we will explore

What is Test Automation?

Let's begin with the basics. In simple terms, test automation is the automatic execution of software testing and management of test data, scripts, etc., without involving a human element.

It is widely used in enterprise application development initiatives worldwide to help accelerate the launch of apps or new features for existing apps. From startup firms to large businesses, an increasingly large number of enterprises have prioritized test automation in their digital maturity roadmap. It leverages automation tools on which test engineers can create scripts and test cases that can be reused any number of times to automatically run testing activities for similar software functionality and reliability parameters.

The primary reasons for the migration of software test activities from manual to automation testing are savings in terms of cost and effort and the elimination of biased testing, which usually happens with manual testing practices.

Types of Automated Test Initiatives

Just as with manual testing practices, test automation operates on a similar scale and diversity, covering a wide range of end-to-end quality assurance practices.

Let us take a look at the various types of automated test initiatives followed by enterprises:

Code Testing focuses on empowering developers or programmers to create and maintain sustainable and efficient coding practices. It helps to check for vulnerable code snippets that may pose security risks, or it can also be used to correct formatting and style discrepancies before the code is checked out for execution or compiling.

Unit Testing enables quality assurance for a single piece of code or code unit representing a particular software module or functionality. It works well when dependencies with other modules, databases, external APIs, etc., are not considered. It focuses on the code or code block alone and is usually very fast in execution.

Integration Testing helps ensure the quality of an application suite where different modules or sub-functions are integrated and constantly communicate via APIs and other messaging services. Automation of integration testing is complicated because there are a lot of dependencies that need to be mapped, test cases to be provisioned dynamically, and several resources and runtime environments to be set up depending on the number of integrated interfaces being tested.

Regression Testing ensures that a software or code block offers uninterrupted functioning after any change has been made to it recently. Automating regression testing through a tool or platform with a user-friendly interface can significantly help save time and effort.

Performance Testing caters to ensuring that the application serves its purpose under any condition of scale or utilization volumes. For example, a website's performance under extreme web traffic can be a perfect use case for performance testing. It is a key pillar that ensures a sustainable future for any digital application as it grows and accumulates transactional volumes significantly higher than in the initial days.

Acceptance Testing deals with testing the scenarios for end-user acceptance of an application. This is one of the most critical areas of testing where actual end-user behavior is mimicked in the testing stage to ascertain whether the application can work without disruption under any stressed condition. It is the final stage where developers and project managers can verify whether all requirements laid out during the initial requirement study phase have been met by the final product or feature being tested.

Test Automation Framework Best Practices

A test automation framework enables better efficiency and fewer complications for enterprises in their QA initiatives.

It is advisable to follow a framework with the below best practices:

Identify the right criterion for automation

Create scripts aligning to business requirements

Involve all stakeholders from development to business users

Wisely pick tools, test data, and allied resources that cater to business needs

Extend coverage to all areas of development over time

Prioritize the type of testing to be deployed across each module or functional unit

Set standards for reporting

Enable continuous feedback integration

This is important to help improve the agility of the QA practice and enable faster roll-out of QA vetted software into the market for consumers and end-users.

Challenges in Test Automation

Test automation is not without its fair share of challenges. It's not always a walk-in-the-park situation where test engineers design and deploy the most suitable test automation approach to meet all quality needs for enterprise applications.

Some of the most common challenges that plague test automation efforts at enterprises are:

Choosing the right testing approach

High implementation costs upfront

Inefficient communication and collaboration between the development and testing team

Selection of appropriate resources for test automation

Lack of skilled resources

Poor reporting

Why Test Automation is important?

Despite the several challenges with test automation, it is unwise not to implement it in your software development initiatives. This is because test automation brings in significantly high ROI in terms of long-term cost savings, faster time to market for software and features, better utilization of technology workforce, and above all, a reliable and efficient application ecosystem.

The best solution to mitigate the challenges in test automation is to use the right tool with the best architecture for seamless automation efficiency. Try ACCELQ and achieve 3x productivity and over 70% savings.

GEOSLEY ANDRADES

Director, Product Evangelist at ACCELQ.

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What is Test Automation? Everything you wanted to know

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Test automation is a critical pillar of the digital transformation ambitions of today's enterprises. Therefore, enterprise leaders need to know clearly why test automation is essential and about various best practices, test automation frameworks, and the challenges in test automation.

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By 2024, the software automation testing market will be worth over USD 28.8 billion globally. Selenium will be one of the key contributors to this growth story. So, what is Selenium? Nearly every enterprise with a successful test automation strategy in place for their digital enterprise ecosystem will be aware of the top automation platforms in the market for automation testing. Selenium will occupy the top spot in terms of platform preferences in most cases. However, as with most software platforms, implementing a test automation strategy with Selenium is not without its fair share of challenges. Enterprises need to be aware of these challenges and the means to mitigate them. To know why Selenium testing is successful, it is crucial to understand the challenges in Selenium automation and the best practices to minimize or eliminate challenges.

In this blog, we will cover

Selenium is a popular open-source test automation tool or platform that offers a framework on top of which software testing professionals can build and execute automated test scripts. In addition, Selenium provides an interface that allows the writing of test scripts in various popular programming languages like Ruby, Node JS, Python, Java, C#, PHP, etc.

Selenium testing allows enterprises to validate web applications across different browsers for their functionality and compatibility. Selenium comprises a suite of software tools, each catering to different QA testing needs of an enterprise for their different technology implementations. Once a test script is written in a preferred programming language, Selenium enables its execution on a browser instance in any targeted device like a smartphone or tablet PC or an actual PC. This allows testing teams to save countless hours of testing time, which would have been needed if they had to manually validate every module of an application in an actual run-time environment outside of the development ecosystem. In the absence of Selenium automation, ensuring the quality of a large enterprise application from an end-to-end perspective could take days or weeks to complete.

Despite being a major player in the global automation testing market, the use of Selenium often leads to challenging situations for enterprises. It occurs primarily because of poor strategic planning and a lack of awareness of how to leverage different functionalities of the test automation tool according to unique characteristics of business applications.

Let us explore four key challenges in Selenium automation.

Modern websites are moving away from a multi-page approach and instead are focusing on retaining a single-page version on which different hidden elements are constantly pulled into action dynamically from servers on demand. This can create challenges for test professionals while writing test scripts on Selenium.

Today, more content is consumed on mobile devices worldwide than traditional computer screens. Hence, it is essential to ensure that any web application needs are tested for reliability on mobile OS browsers releasing to the market. Selenium, by default, doesn't offer too much reliability for mobile browser testing for capabilities such as responsive design.

For security reasons, most websites today leverage measures such as captcha to prevent unauthorized bot attacks on different subsections in the webpage. End-users can access them only after they solve the captcha. Additionally, there could be system pop-up messages and notifications that can come up from the operating system side, over which, the Selenium testing environment has little interaction whatsoever. From a testing perspective, this can become challenging as Selenium doesn't have a captcha solving intelligence in its arsenal inherently. It also cannot handle pop-up activities from the underlying OS.

As the application grows in usage and feature additions, the scope and coverage of the testing landscape also increase. While Selenium lets you run test builds in sequence over multiple environments, it may not be very effective as the application size increases. It is important to note that automation of the software testing stage is effective when testers can run as many tests as possible covering all possible scenarios. Hence, scalability issues can impact the overall test quality in the long run.

The challenges mentioned above may seem like a deterrent for enterprises in trusting Selenium for their test automation needs. However, it is easy to eliminate these challenges with the right approach and strategic configurations, and modifications to the Selenium tool. Most businesses do not have this knowledge and, therefore, they are more likely to not succeed in terms of ROI with Selenium automation in their testing landscape. Almost all the challenges mentioned above have workarounds.

The issue of dynamic content loading in web pages as well as pop-up and captcha management can be solved by using wait times, both implicit and explicit, in the Selenium framework. It can pause the test execution till all relevant running conditions are met and satisfactory. As for mobile testing, Selenium has offerings like the Appium that allow developers to test and validate content on native mobile OS browsers and check for their compatibility and responsiveness. Finally, Selenium Grid allows the parallel execution of test cases at any scale to help in resolving scalability issues.

It is important to note that nearly all the challenges in Selenium automation have solutions, and the real problem is the lack of knowledge of enterprises to implement the workaround solution. Selenium testing is one of the most prolific QA innovations. It has made a lasting impact on the way software development standards have improved over the last decade. Having the proper guidance and knowledge on leveraging the various facets of Selenium automation is the real test of faith for enterprises. For this, it is essential to have powerful testing platforms like ACCELQ using which, you can create the most strategic success roadmap for automation testing in your businesses.

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What is Selenium? What are the challenges in Selenium Automation?

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By 2024, the software automation testing market will be worth over USD 28.8 billion globally. Selenium will be one of the key contributors to this growth story. So, what is Selenium? Nearly every enterprise with a successful test automation strategy in place for their digital enterprise ecosystem will be aware of the top automation platforms in the market for automation testing.

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What is Mobile testing? What is the perfect approach to mobile testing? | ACCELQ

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Mobile testing is a software testing type that tests mobile applications for usability, functionality, and performance. Using manual or automated testing tools and techniques, it enables organizations to verify if their mobile applications work as intended and meet the needs of end-users.

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In 2012, a global financial services company Knight Capital suffered a loss of $440 million in 45 minutes. The company that took almost two decades to become the most prominent U.S. equity trader went bankrupt within an hour. Why? The software engineer responsible for manually refactoring the code skipped pasting it on one of the servers. Hence, when the system went live, this server executed an old code, which unwantedly bought 397 million shares in under one hour. Regrettably, as per the NYSE policies, the trade done could not be reversed.

This is an acute example of DevOps practices not being followed with due diligence and/or overlooked altogether. Such cases, albeit smaller in size and scope, are more likely to creep up in the modern-day IT-driven enterprise world, where everything is expected to be digitally proactive.

Hence, leveraging the power of DevOps to streamline and accelerate the release process and bring about a cultural change is fundamental to product/service development. These form the very core of successful digital transformation.

Along those lines, this article elaborates on the prominence of Azure DevOps and its relevance to application development. It covers the following:

What is Azure DevOps?

Azure DevOps is a set of tools and services offered by Microsoft to help software development teams provision, manage, and monitor their production environments. It provides a unified set of DevOps tools that can be used to automate, orchestrate, and manage the delivery of applications and services.

Azure DevOps focuses on initiating modernization in the software development lifecycle (SDLC) to create a culture of continuous delivery. This translates to optimizing the processes of source control, build, test, and release. This, in turn, can lead to faster time-to-market and reduce project costs.

That said, Azure DevOps provides the facility of employing their DevOps practices to both cloud and on-premises applications. The former, i.e., Azure DevOps Services, can scale on-demand per the needs of the projects and organizations on the whole. The latter, i.e., Azure DevOps Server, entails collecting projects or deploying multiple servers. Either way, both approaches provide essentially the same features and fit aptly with an organization's environment and needs.

What is Azure DevOps Used for?

Azure DevOps offers a slew of features, which can be used to accelerate the SDLC. Some of the prominent ones include:

Agile Planning: Provides a collaborative environment for planning projects by centralizing code, software libraries, and testing tools. This helps map the code changes and the associated test-related artifacts across the team.

CI/CD Pipeline: From maintaining the application stability to keeping its uptime intact and accelerating app development to automating the build-release process, Azure DevOps enables the automatic, sequential execution of tasks across multiple environments thanks to its powerful standalone services like Azure Pipelines (discussed later).

Customizability: Customizable dashboards and workflows can be used to monitor, track, share trends, and boost collaboration. Not to forget the facility of configurable widgets and notifications and the ability to pick up the services that are of interest within the organization.

High-end Security: To help secure the otherwise exposed pipelines, Azure DevOps relies on multi-faceted security practices that cater to the specific use cases. These could range from implementing incremental approaches to changing the project structure to even employing security templates. Rest assured, all of this is done with a strong emphasis on the security demand and context.

Key Service Elements of Azure DevOps

Business needs vary, and so do the ways to address them. Microsoft understands this - precisely why it pushes Azure DevOps components as standalone services.

These include the following:

Azure Pipelines: Azure DevOps Pipelines is a set of cloud-based services that expedite automation of the build, test, and deployment processes for applications. It also helps ensure consistency between environments by integrating with triggers, plans, and steps which are executed automatically. This way, it forms the basis for CI/CD processes and, subsequently - continuous testing and code analysis, including coverage metrics. The good thing about Azure Pipelines it is mostly language-agnostic, providing the facility to code in Python, Java, C#, C++, JavaScript, etc.

Azure Boards: Even if taming the complexity of the projects isn't easy, Azure Boards can still prove to be significantly valuable. Through Scrum and Kanban (work/project management frameworks), Azure Boards helps track and report the progress of various work items across the teams.

Azure Artifacts: Azure Artifacts is a service, which aims to bring a more cohesive experience for developers and users by providing tools for uploading, sharing, and tracking all kinds of packages (registries like Maven, NuGet) across the organization. It further helps assimilate such artifacts into the Azure pipeline.

Azure Repos: Code's source control solution, Azure Repos, allows tracking, sharing, and syncing of all the source code. Version control tools can individually tailor this for every team or project being worked on.

Azure Test Plans: Testing, especially continuous testing, is necessary for any app development. It helps capture software quality metrics and aids in detecting outages, performance issues, and other problems across the applications. Azure Test Plans help with the same alongside offering manual/exploratory testing facilities.

ACCELQ Integration with Azure DevOps - Azure Marketplace

Azure DevOps sets the foundation for greater collaboration, faster delivery of apps, and hence is a key component to the DevOps movement. ACCELQ's close-knit integration with Azure DevOps and Dynamics 365 helps accelerate the development process by automating tasks, saving time and resources. This is made possible by:

AI-driven Codeless Automation: From test management to execution tracking, ACCELQ makes everything straightforward with its agile dashboard and visual app models.

Continuous Testing: ACCELQ leverages in-sprint automation, automated cloud-based executions and integrates with Azure DevOps to achieve a complete end-to-end testing experience.

Learn more about how ACCELQ uses Azure DevOps to manage code test coverage, build, and release successfully. Reach out to us!

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What is Azure DevOps and Why you Should Care | ACCELQ

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In 2012, a global financial services company Knight Capital suffered a loss of $440 million in 45 minutes. The company that took almost two decades to become the most prominent U.S. equity trader went bankrupt within an hour. Why? The software engineer responsible for manually refactoring the code skipped pasting it on one of the servers.

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As software products today become increasingly complex, maximizing test coverage is probably every tester's primary goal for testing software applications. Testers worldwide are already relying on an array of different testing tools and approaches. However, there is a pressing need to test software systems (along with all their sub-systems) from beginning to end.

End-to-end testing allows testing teams to drive quality across the entire pipeline, replicating real user scenarios. In addition, it empowers teams to validate software systems and their sub-systems for data integrity.

Read this blog to know

What is end-to-end testing?

A popular methodology used in the software development lifecycle, end-to-end testing enables testing teams to test the functionality and performance of a software application replicating live settings - and under product-like circumstances. By simulating what a real-world scenario looks like, E2E testing validates not just the system under test but also all its sub-systems - to ensure they work and behave as expected.

End-to-end testing ensures every operation the application performs is accurate via the proper communication and integration with underlying components such as hardware, network, databases, and other applications.

What are the benefits of E2E testing?

End-to-end testing verifies all the building blocks that make up software or application. By testing every core functionality and each backend layer of the app, end-to-end testing verifies the overall function of the software and the interaction between individual tiers in the architecture - thus resulting in the development and delivery of high-quality software and consistent user experiences.

Let's look at some benefits of E2E testing:

1. Tests each sub-system that makes up the application: With modern applications being built on layers of sub-systems across UI and API layers, networks, internal (and external) databases, and third-party integrations, end-to-end testing ensures each of these components works perfectly - in isolation as well as in association with all other components.

2. Improves test coverage and outcomes: Complex software applications made up of several smaller systems and sub-systems require comprehensive test coverage for best results. E2E testing helps test the entire application, from start to finish - both at the API and UI layers. Using automated and manual testing practices aids in maximizing test coverage while constantly uncovering bugs and issues in an exploratory manner.

3. Ensures bugs and issues are detected in time: The software is tested after every iteration in end-to-end testing. This allows testers to detect bugs and issues faster, and also earlier in the life cycle. The chances of bugs making their way further into the testing (or production) process are significantly reduced - thus ensuring the application is free of bugs and works seamlessly across its lifecycle.

4. Ensures the long-term success of software applications: Failure of even one aspect or sub-system can bring down the entire product's performance or functionality. E2E testing helps maintain the stability of each component - thus ensuring the long-term success of the application under test. By incorporating different kinds of tests across the application lifecycle, end-to-end testing helps create additional test cases - that may not have been considered previously.

5. Maintains application health and well-being: Because E2E testing validates the performance of your application at every level, it keeps the health and well-being of your application at all times. By continuously testing applications from frontend to backend and across multiple sub-systems, end-to-end testing provides a much-needed perspective on software performance across different levels and environments.

6. Reduces testing effort and costs: Improved test coverage and the detection of bugs and issues sooner in the application development lifecycle also paves the way for reduced testing efforts and costs. Comprehensive testing at every step of the way ensures fewer bugs and earlier identification of breakdowns - thus minimizing the probability of repeat tests, and thus ultimately, the associated effort, time, and costs.

What are some best practices for developing an end-to-end testing framework?

Developing an end-to-end testing framework requires testing teams to take a well-planned and focused approach.

Here are some best practices to keep in mind while you chart out your end-to-end testing framework:

Before you embark on the end-to-end testing journey, make sure to analyze your requirements thoroughly. Have a clear idea of how the software or app is supposed to work in every aspect and then accordingly set up a test environment that aligns with all the requirements

List down all the testing methods, tools, and approaches you plan to use to carry out successful E2E testing. Include clear and detailed descriptions of standards that need to be followed in each test.

Since test cases in any E2E test suite must be run in a specific sequence, make sure to create workflows that match the path users would take as they navigate through your application. This will help you get insight into the problems users might face while using your application; it will also help you rectify gaps effectively.

Don't limit your testing to a handful of test cases. For best results, create multiple test cases to test every functionality of the software and assign at least one test case for every condition.

Make a list of all the defects you have uncovered and prioritize them based on their severity or criticality. This will help you resolve critical bugs at the earliest while simultaneously improving the quality, performance, and availability of your software application.

Periodically track and monitor the progress of E2E testing to ensure the right test cases are being created to test every feature of the software or application under development. Such tracking can help you unearth gaps and challenges in your testing process while empowering you to plan for overcoming them in time for the best outcomes.

Software applications today do not operate in isolation. Instead, they are part of an interconnected and tightly integrated ecosystem of several other systems, networks, and databases. Although such integration paves the way for a seamless and consistent user experience, it makes the app's workflow considerably complicated on the backend. Carrying out end-to-end testing of such complex applications ensures the application (and its many dependencies) is working correctly, and that data is being shared accurately between multiple components.

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What is End-to-End Testing - All You Need to Know | ACCELQ

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As software products today become increasingly complex, maximizing test coverage is probably every tester's primary goal for testing software applications. Testers worldwide are already relying on an array of different testing tools and approaches. However, there is a pressing need to test software systems (along with all their sub-systems) from beginning to end.

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Errors, bugs, and fallacies are all a part of the software delivery process. It's the presence of these inefficiencies that ultimately paves the way for an improved release. However, that's only possible when a sound testing plan is in place, and understandably so.

The term "sound testing plan," however, fuels a separate discussion around the best testing practices for a particular scenario and application - Should it be a test-driven approach? A load-driven scenario? And what about retesting?

That being the case, perplexity in such discussions usually becomes the front-runner courtesy of presumably synonymous overlapping testing methods. One such confusion bothers the concepts of regression testing and retesting.

For instance, a retest is when you manually re-run a previously performed regression test to see if it still works. In contrast, a regression test ensures that new features or functionality don't break existing components or functionality. Unfortunately, when running regular regression tests, it's easy to be lulled into assuming that they are the same thing as retests.

Although both contribute significantly to the entire testing process, their implementation, application, and execution are different. So, let's make sure we don't confuse these two terms anymore, shall we?

In this blog, we will understand

What is Regression Testing?

What is Retesting?

Contrary to regression testing, retesting is done to test whether a particular feature or functionality that has been developed, tested, and released is working as expected. It's generally carried out after significant modifications to the code or software are made.

When running retests, your goal is to determine whether any known bugs have re-emerged or whether new bugs have appeared.

When Is Regression Testing Done?

A variety of cases entail the application of regression testing, including after a new feature or functionality is implemented, after an upgrade or patch is installed, before deploying a new release, and more.

The most common types of regression tests can be summarized as follows:

When is Retesting Done?

The most common types of retest cases can be summarized as follows:

Regression vs. Retesting - Overview of the Differences

Final Thoughts

Regression testing is more involved than retesting, and the benefits of proceeding with this type of testing are considerable. However, there's no denying that a coalition of retesting and regression testing is helpful in the long run because the thoroughness of the process is considerably extended.

In that light, the choice between them doesn't exist. Both of them overlap in how they function, and it's the testing process per se gives them a distinctive identity - which, again, is not to be misunderstood.

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What is Regression Testing? How is it different from Retesting? | ACCELQ

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Errors, bugs, and fallacies are all a part of the software delivery process. It's the presence of these inefficiencies that ultimately paves the way for an improved release. However, that's only possible when a sound testing plan is in place, and understandably so.

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In this blog, we will understand

TDD and BDD: The Similarities

Before exploring the TDD vs. BDD debate, it's important first to unpack the meaning of TDD and BDD and understand their commonalities and differences.

Both TDD and BDD are testing methods to find bugs and correct issues in software applications. Also, in both forms, test writing happens before code writing.

These similarities notwithstanding, TDD BDD are different approaches to testing.

TDD and BDD: The Differences

Test-driven Development

Test-driven development or TDD means that a developer writes a test for functionality and runs it to see it fail because the functionality doesn't exist. Then they would write code to make the test pass. Finally, after refactoring code and repeating this "Red-Green-Refactor" loop multiple times, they would have code that creates a complete feature.

The TDD testing methodology is implemented from a developer's perspective. They write automated test cases before functional pieces of code. The goal is to understand "is this code valid?" If it's not, the test will fail. Only then will the developer refactor the code, i.e., change it without modifying its key behavior. They then run the test as many times as needed for it to pass successfully

Behavior-driven Development

Behavior-driven development (BDD) is derived from TDD. Like TDD, BDD is also a "test-first approach." However, unlike TDD, BDD involves multiple stakeholders, such as developers, test engineers and testers, Product managers, and users, who work together to ideate various acceptance criteria in a user's story.

Also, BDD takes a different approach to software testing since it tests the system's actual behavior from the end users' perspective. Thus, in BDD, tests are written using a "Given-Then-When" behavioral approach:

These behavior examples are described in a simple "shared language" such as English or a domain-specific language for writing behavior scenarios, such as Gherkin. The examples are then converted into executable specifications by developers.

The TDD vs. BDD Debate

Essentially, the BDD vs. TDD debate boils down to "Is TDD better than BDD, or vice versa?"

BDD and TDD are both testing strategies where the tests are used as part of an automated testing framework. However, they differ in scope. So, before adopting either approach, developers should ask, "What am I testing for?"

Answer 1: The software's implementation.

Choice 1: TDD

Answer 2: The software's behavior.

Choice 2: BDD

In TDD, the tests will fail when a functionality doesn't exist. But as new code is written (refactored), the system will evolve until the complete feature is obtained, at which point the test will pass. In comparison, BDD testing looks at a system's behavior to understand how it will behave when certain conditions are realized.

Since TDD is developer-focused, tests are written by the developers. That explains why it predominantly focuses on testing smaller pieces of functionality in isolation. Contrarily and as elucidated above, BDD tests an application's behavior from the user's perspective, which is why the automated specifications are created by users or testers, not by developers. Moreover, these tests are not written in a programming language but in a shared language that everyone speaks. Test automation engineers then translate into the code under test. Besides, BDD is principally concerned with the results of a high-level scenario, and its goal is to ensure that the output is correct under a given condition.

The Benefits of TDD and BDD

Both TDD and BDD have their advantages and benefits.

Benefits of TDD

Benefits of BDD

Many Agile teams still use TDD instead of BDD since TDD often results in higher-quality code. However, since BDD improves collaboration among a wider audience, it can result in better specifications and ensure that the maximum number of use cases work at a higher level. This can result in greater confidence in the final application.

Ultimately, neither approach is "better" than the other. So, which side of the TDD vs. BDD debate you fall on would depend on considering all these factors.

In a Nutshell

If you are a software engineer, don't look at BDD TDD in isolation. Instead, understand the benefits of both approaches, clarify your testing goals, and then choose the approach that suits your project, team, and users better.

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BDD vs TDD - What's the Debate All About? | ACCELQ

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In this blog, we will understand Before exploring the TDD vs. BDD debate, it's important first to unpack the meaning of TDD and BDD and understand their commonalities and differences. Both TDD and BDD are testing methods to find bugs and correct issues in software applications.

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How to Choose The Right Test Automation Tool

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How to Choose The Right Test Automation Tool

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ACCELQ 2.1 – Enhanced Action logic editor, richer Help Center and the all new Activity Center

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ACCELQ 2.1 – Enhanced Action logic editor, richer Help Center and the all new Activity Center

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ACCELQ 2.1 - Enhanced Action logic editor, richer Help Center and the all new Activity Center - ACCELQ®

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accelQ 2.1 has landed, and in the latest release, we are bringing even more fluidity to Action logic editor, a richer Help center and a new Activity Center.

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ACCELQ 2.1 – Enhanced Action logic editor, richer Help Center and the all new Activity Center

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Top 3 challenges in testing Salesforce applications with Selenium

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Top 3 challenges in testing Salesforce applications with Selenium

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Selenium is a powerful tool to automate user interactions on a browser. A robust Selenium framework with the right design can increase test coverage and save time. This is why many organizations use Selenium for automating their application testing, including Salesforce application.

You may also want to automate your Salesforce application testing with Selenium. Especially when manual testing alone can't cover your testing requirements for regression testing. But applications built on Salesforce are pretty complex and can be challenging to test with Selenium. Here are the top three testing challenges with Selenium scripting, particular to Salesforce test automation.

1. Navigating through frames

driver.switchTo().frame(" Salesforce is a complex application with the front-end built with dynamic frames, that are able to load content independently in the current HTML document. Handling frames is difficult with Selenium as it cannot access the content directly. Normally you would require to switch the Selenium WebDriver to the frame using an attribute like
frame-attribute "); and perform actions within it. Any action that has to be performed outside this frame requires giving explicit instructions to Selenium to move out of that frame like driver.switchTo().parentFrame(); or driver.switchTo().defaultContent(); on a web page.

Frames can be handled by Selenium albeit it takes a lot of effort in finding the right attributes and script accordingly. It becomes more tedious when you deal with nested or hidden frames. As the application can have many frames, a usual 30-50 step test case can take hours of coding and usually results in a brittle script.

2. Executing against dynamic content

Like most modern web application, Salesforce has dynamic elements which do not have a fixed ID, name, class or CSS attributes. So, you cannot hard code the locator of the element. A standard method to detect the fixed part of the locator is not usually straightforward. Minor UI changes can make the tests flaky. Besides, Selenium could get into synchronization issues with element loading. And as most elements load dynamically, the test script needs to add Implicit, Explicit or Fluent Waits.

3. Handling tables

Salesforce application can have a different database driven tables. The rows are created dynamically and could be controlled by different tabs. So, simple actions like ticking a checkbox with Selenium can be quite complicated and prone to errors. Selecting the active tab may be challenging. Commands such as driver.switch_to.window and send_keys may not work reliably.

Other challenges

Salesforce applications can have complexities like Shadow DOM and pop-up windows that are not easy to test with Selenium. Selenium doesn't support such elements directly, hence requiring significant custom coding. The challenges such as test case maintenance is present with testing any complex application.

Though most of the challenges of testing Salesforce with Selenium can be solved, scripting ends up consuming a lot of time. This can impact your continuous testing goals.

Our solution

accelQ is a codeless test automation platform that allows testers to generate test cases for Salesforce with ease. It a cloud-based platform and enhances the power of Selenium making it reliable, scalable and cost-effective.

With accelQ you can overcome the challenges mentioned above without the need for programming. Learn more about our Salesforce test automation solution.

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Top 3 challenges in testing Salesforce applications with Selenium - accelQ®

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Selenium is a powerful tool to automate user interactions on a browser. A robust Selenium framework with the right design can increase test coverage and save time. This is why many organizations use Selenium for automating their application testing, including Salesforce application. You may also want to automate your Salesforce application testing with Selenium.

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Does monitoring your e-commerce website bring any benefits?

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Does monitoring your e-commerce website bring any benefits?

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You probably won't find any issues navigating through your e-commerce website, given that the new release was vetted sufficiently by your QA and certified for the release. But it doesn't mean your visitors will have the same experience. This is because visitors can access a website with various bandwidths, devices, browsers, and geographical locations. And all these external factors influence a website's performance at the user's end; so much so that any minor change can impact the shopping experience.

For instance, you add a third-party marketing plugin (or app) on your webstore to increase sales or to track user behavior. The addition of this plugin may look benign in your internal testing and usually does not get a high level of attention from your QA teams. Such third-party plugins are common on e-commerce platforms like Magento, Shopify, and WordPress. While these e-commerce platforms guarantee industry-best performance in the shopping experience, they usually have no control over assets or response times by third-party plugins. These plugins could cause unexpected issues and behavior.

A continuous monitoring of your e-commerce application can make many issues apparent. It helps to find issues that are deterrent to a smooth shopping experience. However, there are many aspects that you need to consider for an effective monitoring solution. Let's look at them briefly:

Don't limit yourself to monitoring load times

Load-time is not the exclusive metric that determines user experience on your website and monitoring the load-time alone is not sufficient. For an e-commerce customer, the main objective is to complete an online transaction. It is very important to monitor workflows that lead to a successful transaction completion.

The add-to-cart glitch on Amazon's Prime Day of 2016 is a famous example to show the importance of monitoring the quality of workflows. During the Prime Day, the Prime members who pay a premium are given exclusive offers to shop. But the add-to-cart button failed leaving many loyal customers disappointed and angry. It shows that monitoring uptime and load times are essential but not the only factor that decides sales on your e-commerce website.

Being quick and proactive with monitoring

Most associate website monitoring with Real User Monitoring (RUM). RUM is used to gain real-time insights on visitors' interactions. You can track the live load times and bounce rates of the web pages and get alerted when anything is unusually high. But having these insights are not an end in itself. You should also put in a place an organization to address these findings in a timely manner.

While RUM is a reactive approach which is reporting on user activity, it is also very important to proactively monitor business critical workflows. Setup an automated system in place that continuously navigates these important workflows like a real user. Say, a critical workflow for your e-commerce website is Login, Choose an item, Add to cart and Checkout. This is tested at regular intervals with various browsers and geographical locations to collect functional and performance metrics. As these systems test the shopping workflows 24×7, you can proactively detect any issues and correct them before your customers experience issues.

Load time average may not be the right indicator

There are many times when we observe that average load time are high but the web pages seem to load fast. This is because calculating averages of load times is not a perfect method for analysis. Say, in a one-off incidence you get an unusually high load time it will push the average load time higher. The average of load times in such cases are not very accurate metric for an analysis.

So, instead you may want to use percentiles. This method groups all load times according to their occurance. Using this, a 90th percentile would show the highest load time for 90% of the visitors.

Say, load times for 90th percentile is 5 seconds then 90% of the visitors have faced a load time of 5 seconds or lower. You may conclude that the remaining 10% of the visitors have faced a load time of 5 seconds or higher.

Bringing it all together

Monitoring your e-commerce website can bring benefits if you take a holistic approach. You need more careful analysis of metrics and proactively look for issues. Choose the right tool to implement your monitoring strategy, but at the same time it is equally important to setup a system to respond to issues quickly.
accelQ is a cloud-based test automation tool that believes in delivering quality with speed. Learn more about how we enable continuous testing for the Agile teams and how you can setup a reliable monitoring system in place..

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Does monitoring your e-commerce website bring any benefits? - ACCELQ®

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You probably won't find any issues navigating through your e-commerce website, given that the new release was vetted sufficiently by your QA and certified for the release. But it doesn't mean your visitors will have the same experience. This is because visitors can access a website with various bandwidths, devices, browsers, and geographical locations.

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Test Automation in Focus: Threat or Opportunity for Manual Testers?

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Test Automation in Focus: Threat or Opportunity for Manual Testers?

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Ever since Quality Assurance was recognized as a formal practice in Software Development Lifecycle, manual testers have held high the responsibility of ensuring a bug-free software delivery. Over the years, the manual testing community has adapted several tools and processes to continually enhance the outcome and predictability of application quality. Test Automation has proved to be disruptive, and many software testers have jumped on this automation bandwagon so to speak. But with so many predictions, opinions, and innovation around test automation, will the manual tester's role remain the same or will it change with time? Here's our take on the topic:
Test Automation: Was the Purpose Defeated?
With the emergence of continuous advancements in the software development lifecycle, automation was introduced to further help software testers in their craft. The intent was to accelerate and optimize the testing cycle. It was supposed to compliment a manual tester and enable him/her to focus on verifying complex real-world use cases.

On the contrary, it ended up creating two silos, namely - Manual testers and Automation testers. This, in turn, has resulted in a vicious cycle of handoffs which seem to be the norm for many. Organizations running manual and automation in silos end up wasting a lot of time, money, and resources, and more importantly, the impact on overall quality. So rather than reinforcing the manual testers, test automation has created a wide gap.

But with automation becoming the buzz of the day, there is a greater push for adapting more and more automation in the testing cycle. No doubt, this is an excellent development. However, if the core issue of Silo is not resolved, we are further widening the gap between the manual tester and automation tester.
Is Manual Testing becoming obsolete?
The pattern of manual execution of test cases is indeed dying as the number of companies adopting modern development approaches such as Agile, continuous testing (CT), continuous integration (CI), continuous delivery (CD), and DevOps is increasing every day. It not only reduces manual errors to a significant extent but also enhances the speed of software development.

As test automation becomes mainstream, one of the important questions that have baffled software testers is:

Will Automated software testing replace Manual Testers?

Obviously, it isn't a simple "Yes" or "No" answer! The fact is, manual testing alone cannot catch up with the expectations of continuous delivery, and hence automation becomes key. But does that mean manual testing is just going to disappear from the scene?

In this age of automation, manual testing can't be considered as a waste of manpower. Indeed, automation has the upper hand over manual testing and is preferred in regression testing, load testing, repeated execution, and performance testing, still, it can't be completely eliminated from the industry as there are certain areas where manual testing performs better than automated testing.
Humans are Integral to Quality Assurance
If done rightly, automated software testing can save time, add efficiency, minimize efforts, and use human cognitive skills in a productive way. The automated testing environment allows you to execute repetitive tasks and regression tests without the intervention of manual testers. However, quality is a very subtle attribute, and automating the verification of every minor nuance is unimaginable. The same is true for complex integrations and interactions between systems that need to be verified.

One fact needs to be very clear:

Test automation should only be used to reinforce the manual testers and can never completely replace them.
Manual Testers and Automation are Inter-dependent

With automation, manual testers are relieved of repetitive and menial tasks and focus more on critical and creative tasks. With the advent of continuous test automation platforms, it can be said that the manual testing domain is evolving. Human cognitive skills, creativity, and strategy are crucial in software testing. The role of manual testers will not be phased out. At the same time, automated software testing will work as an efficient tool in the hands of manual testers.

Thinking from a Marvel fan's perspective...imagine Thor's hammer in the mighty hands of Captain America.
image via pinterest

Manual Testers: The Captains in Software Testing World
Manual testers are the real captains in the Software testing world. These professionals do not just bring in their testing skills, but also years of experience in the domain. Just like Captain America, the manual testers may not feel necessary or worthy to use automated software testing due to the existing technical complexity. However, Thor's hammer worked wonders in the mighty hands of Captain America. Likewise, manual testers are capable of harnessing the power of software automation testing tools and use it effectively in their craft.
Future of Automation
An automated software testing platform helps businesses accelerate their QA process and save both time and effort. However, if script development and maintenance itself is a complicated effort, benefits are hardly realized. Organizations cannot sustain a self-serving automation model for too long (where automation ROI is questionable). Automation platforms need to be much simpler and reliable for manual testers to ultimately achieve continuous delivery.
An Opportunity for Manual Testers
As subject matter experts, manual testers can supplement their testing effort with the help of automated platforms. Humans are more suitable in performing emotionally-driven tasks that require creativity. There can be a perfect combination of manual and automation where manual handling the exploratory testing and automation handling the regression. In addition, manual testers can play a crucial role in providing concrete inputs, suggestions, feedback, and recommend changes to automation. As test automation becomes mainstream, manual testers will only become more efficient in their efforts and keep achieving productivity in their craft!
ACCELQ: Next-generation agile testing platform
Imagine a cloud-based continuous testing platform that empowers you to seamlessly automate your API and web testing...and all of this without writing a single line of code! For many, it is still an endeavor, but turned it into a reality. ACCELQ has made continuous test automation platform a reality and breaks the silos between manual and automation test platforms. It enables manual testers to harness the power of automation while making automation engineers even more efficient at their task. Check out the proven Continuous Test Automation Platform helping IT teams across major enterprises.

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Test Automation in Mainstream: Threat or Opportunity for manual testers?

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Ever since Quality Assurance was recognized as a formal practice in Software Development Lifecycle, manual testers have held high the responsibility of ensuring a bug-free software delivery. Over the years, the manual testing community has adapted several tools and processes to continually enhance the outcome and predictability of application quality.

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Perils of Record and Playback Test Automation - ACCELQ®

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One prevalent practice since the early days of test automation has been the concept of record and playback. This process is marketed by automation tool vendors (against controlled demo environments) as an effective means to achieve "quick & magical" result for automating the application-under-test.

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Test case automation has been around for 15+ years. It was an exciting time when at Mercury, we first introduced Winrunner. It was a breakthrough both from technology and process point of view and could bring considerable acceleration in the QA cycle. And of course, it helped us at Mercury lead this space for many-many years to come.

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One of the fundamental steps in automating a UI interaction as part of testing is to set up an identification criterion for various elements that the test needs to interact with. It is one of the critical components that define how stable and hassle-free your automation test will perform.

For example, given a Login test scenario with the following steps

Enter username in Username field (an HTML input element of type INPUT)

Enter password in Password field (an HTML Password element)

Click Login button (an HTML Button element)

Username, Password, and Login fields in the above scenario need to be properly recognized using HTML attributes before performing any action on these (such as entering text or clicking on a button).
Traditional approach
A general approach supported and heavily practiced today is using a standard set of static properties for each element depending on its HTML type. For example, elements of type INPUT will be recognized by their ID, name, class or value properties, etc. based on applicability. This approach has been in use since the inception of test automation and has decently served use cases until a few years back.
Current UI technology landscape
With the proliferation of new-age UI frameworks such as Bootstrap, Angular, JQuery, React, etc. and advanced data-binding models, this approach of element identification has started to prove inadequate. User Experience centric applications with subtle interactions and dynamic data has made this process even more complicated. It also tends to be fragile and sensitive to trivial changes in the application UI.

Identifying an element in the web applications today requires a broader context of the element and understanding of spatial relations with other elements on the page. Element in itself may not offer any of its own attributes to uniquely identify. Automation test API frameworks such as Selenium, offer programming approach to building this comprehensiveness into element ID. But it requires a good understanding of the DOM hierarchy at a technical level and custom programming effort. You usually end up going with straight XPath or CSS based approaches, which could prove to be brittle.
A fresh perspective
accelQ brings unique innovation in this complex and important aspect of a test automation cycle with the following benefits:

Automatically construct unique identification with a combination of neighborhood attributes

Enable testers to visually analyze element structure

Provide real-time feedback with match-count during the analysis process

Ability to incorporate regex or pattern at any attribute level

Ability to deal with a set of related elements (family of elements) with "anchoring" concept

Ability to deal with repeat elements and dynamic content

To identify an element, accelQ analyzes the entire neighborhood and finds a combination of attributes required to bring a stable uniqueness. This could include a combination of ancestor or descendant hierarchy, properties of siblings or linked elements etc. as part of the overall neighborhood. The entire analysis process is visualized so that it is accessible for non-technical audience.

Just one more example of how accelQ is driving fresh innovation in Quality Lifecycle Automation!

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Neighborhood-aware Element Identification for Change Resilience - ACCELQ®

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One of the fundamental steps in automating a UI interaction as part of testing is to set up an identification criterion for various elements that the test needs to interact with. It is one of the critical components that define how stable and hassle-free your automation test will perform.

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"The success of digital business transformation strategies is dependent on a much more comprehensive approach to quality than just answering the question 'does it work' ?" - as per Gartner.

And it's totally true. Unfortunately, all tools in the market today are geared towards finding defects, which of course does not improve quality. Software Development Lifecycle has adopted Agile methodology leaving the behind the waterfall phases and silos. But Software Test Lifecycle is still stuck in "waterfall" mode of Requirements - Test design - Manual - Automation - Execution etc. Shifting left and Agile Testing will only remain concepts on paper as long as the software test lifecycle follows the waterfall phases. Test Driven Development is a good attempt to bring Agility to testing but does not come with a specific prescription of tool and process to make it a reality.

If we get to the root of what slows us down, "dependency" is one of the major hurdles that stands out. Today's "browser automation" tools are all too dependent on application readiness to even begin the process of automation. Unit testing and API testing allow you to test early, but it is not a substitute for a comprehensive UI level automation. And there again, separate tools create additional silos. The key is to automate across the lifecycle and do it in one simple integrated validation process, rather than breaking them into silos.

What if you are able to abstract your application even before it is built, down to the finest level of detail that your automated testing requires? This can allow you to build your test automation assets and scenarios in parallel to your application development. You can get Automation ready Day-1. It's only one of the many ways accelQ is breaking ground to help achieve a simple goal - Test Early, Get Agile, and Improve Application Quality!

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It's High Time Testing Goes Agile! - ACCELQ®

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"The success of digital business transformation strategies is dependent on a much more comprehensive approach to quality than just answering the question 'does it work' ?" - as per Gartner. And it's totally true. Unfortunately, all tools in the market today are geared towards finding defects, which of course does not improve quality.

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Don't let any expert tell you the starting point of your automation is manual test cases. In fact, if manual test cases are used as a starting point to automate, the outcome is poor automation design and test cases that are brittle and a maintenance nightmare.

Manual test cases and test steps do not correlate to automation scenarios, coz they do not end to end, they are not parameterized, they are not written with modularity and re-usability in mind...I could go on and. Moreover, this approach leads us to "What % of your manual is automated?" which in itself is a losing battle.

Automation should be integrated into the overall lifecycle, and not a "test automation" silo. Test planning, design, scenario creation, test data planning are all part of the basic steps of the Quality lifecycle. If each one is handled in silo the result is automation becomes an overhead that drags us instead of giving us speed.

Of course, its easier said than done, but its important to break the cycle of "manual test cases feeding to automation".

Let your manual test development process right from inception be driven with the goal of automation. This means bring in the modularity that is compatible with automation design. Model and design your data models that support various combinations of test cases for a particular scenario. Don't let "test data" be an afterthought, an early data design coupled with workflow scenario design is critical to maximizing coverage.

accelQ achieves this with a unique visual Application universe driven scenario designer with an integrated data modeller. Take it for a test ride you will be surprised by how simply and elegantly it's achieved!

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Don't use Manual Test cases for Automation - ACCELQ®

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Don't let any expert tell you the starting point of your automation is manual test cases. In fact, if manual test cases are used as a starting point to automate, the outcome is poor automation design and test cases that are brittle and a maintenance nightmare.

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The Selenium Story - Ingredients for a Sustainable Adaption - ACCELQ®

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Learn how to see how to simplify Selenium and make automation simpler, agile and more sustainable | accelQ®

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The all new next-generation manual testing tool with test tracking, traceability & integrations Only platform with Manual & Automation testing under the same hood

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Manual Tester to Automation engineer, What does it take?

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Manual Tester to Automation engineer, What does it take?

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Manual testers are solid pillars in the software testing industry. With the current automation buzz, will it continue to remain the same? Will the manual tester be replaced with automation scripts? Should manual testers switch profession? or should they scramble and join the selenium band wagon. The video is designed to simplify the answer to these questions. Check out whether the manual testers should be worried or happy.

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Manual Tester to Automation engineer, What does it take?

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AccelQ is Codeless Test Automation and Test Management platform on Cloud. OR https://www.accelq.com/blog/whats-new-accelq-3-0/

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Love Selenium ? See how accelQ complements Selenium to bring 3x speed to your automation development & maintenance. OR https://www.accelq.com/blog/accelq-selenium-match-made-heaven/

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accelQ® simplifies API testing with codeless natural language automation. It achieves regression maturity for a true end-to-end validation with API and GUI all in the same flow. OR https://www.accelq.com/blog/accelq-api-regression-automation/

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Webinar - Achieve continuous delivery with Quality Lifecycle Automation

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Webinar - Achieve continuous delivery with Quality Lifecycle Automation

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Test case automation isn't enough for Agile testing. Lets walk thru accelQ's quality lifecycle automation in this webinar. OR https://www.accelq.com/blog/agile-testing-needs-just-test-case-automation/

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Webinar - Achieve continuous delivery with Quality Lifecycle Automation

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Webinar - API & UI test automation simplified All in the same flow

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Webinar - API & UI test automation simplified All in the same flow

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Bring API test automation to mainstream, with a simplified and integrated approach OR  https://www.accelq.com/blog/api-ui-test-automation-simplified-flow/

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Webinar - API & UI test automation simplified  All in the same flow

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AccelQ Salesforce Universe - Automate 3x faster

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AccelQ Salesforce Universe - Automate 3x faster

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AccelQ Salesforce Content Pack accelerates Salesforce test automation with pre-defined Salesforce Universe, Codeless natural language automation and automated change impact analysis capabilities. Achieve over 3x acceleration in QA phase of Salesforce implementations. OR https://www.accelq.com/blog/accelq-salesforce-universe/

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accelQ Salesforce Universe - Automate 3x faster

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Cloud based Continuous Testing Platform for Functional & API Automation OR https://www.accelq.com/blog/accelq-product-overview/

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5 tips for a stable element ID in Selenium automation

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5 tips for a stable element ID in Selenium automation

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Element Identification is a crucial step in achieving automated test interaction in Selenium against browser-based applications. Poor element identification design results in failure to identify elements at run time thus leading to stability issues. Entire test execution could come to a halt with just the username field not being identified at runtime.

This consideration is even more significant for today's day and age applications with rich user interactions. The layout of webpages is extremely complex and often dynamic in nature. No more are the days you could recognize an element with just its ID or name and assume it stay static.

It is very much a recognized fact in the Selenium community that test automation coding should follow proper design and programming practices. But when it comes to element identification, design effort is often overlooked. Most of the time element ID is setup based on ad-hoc considerations without a rigorous thought. Here are some best practices to consider while setting up element identification in Selenium.

1. Use minimal number of attributes possible
It is always a good practice to use the least possible number of attributes to identify an element. Pick the minimum set of attributes, thoroughly considering their long-term stability. Don't be tempted to use more number of attributes, just because they all appear meaningful and reliable. Unintended (non-functional) changes to the application are not avoidable, and you are increasing the chances of failure with a greater number of attributes.

2. Good neighbors may not be all that uncommon
As you analyze the element for identification properties, sometimes the neighborhood may offer much better stable attributes than the element itself. Be sure to check out the surroundings before deciding on the identification criterion. Ancestors, descendants or siblings could be involved in an element ID.

3. Be wary of false uniqueness
Thoroughly consider the attribute value before picking an attribute for element ID. Analyze possibilities of variations across test runs. Try out with multiple instances of the web page, if in doubt. Sometimes, the variations may not be all that obvious. Application functional knowledge may also be helpful to decipher the attribute values and decide on the stability. ID values with special characters or class names related to the UI framework such as "ng-", may not be suitable for identification.

4. Get a handle on patterns
Regular expression patterns come in very handy to define attribute values. With dynamic data and workflows presented on the applications, it is a very common use case for pattern-based matching. Review and practice common regex patterns and syntax; a lot of times, a simple regex is all that you need to build stable identification.

5. Avoid path based reliance
Unless there is no other way to ensure the uniqueness of an element, do not use xpath type of path-based identification. DOM structure is very much an application page design concern; avoid hardwiring to the exact path of an element in the DOM.Use CSS or JQuery based selectors as much as possible.

With a small upfront effort and discipline, while designing element identification, you can achieve a substantial improvement in your Selenium test execution reliability and thus avoid a lot of rework.

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5 tips for a stable element ID in Selenium automation - ACCELQ®

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Element Identification is a crucial step in achieving automated test interaction in Selenium against browser-based applications. Poor element identification design results in failure to identify elements at run time thus leading to stability issues. Entire test execution could come to a halt with just the username field not being identified at runtime.

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Take your API Testing to Regression maturity in 3 Steps

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Take your API Testing to Regression maturity in 3 Steps

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API's are the backbone of today's digital eco-system. API's are no longer limited to just integrating applications, they host the most critical components of business in modern application architecture. API testing, unfortunately, has not matured relative to the critical importance of API's.

All the tools and processes around API testing are white-box testing driven, developer-oriented and limit their automation to request-response automation.

Limiting to white-box testing used to be ok for API validations when they were just limited to providing integrations between applications. API's now are a more critical part of end-to-end business flow and hosting complex rules and logic, more so with microservices, etc.

API validations need to have some level of maturity as functional black-box testing with full-blown regressions and integrated end-to-end validations across UI and APIs.
3 steps to make this happen:

API Automation strategy

The notion of API automation should be a lot more than just automating request-response and its validations. Regression oriented API automation means having a modular and reusable driven API test suite. API test suite that can assure coverage not just from data values, but also from business processes it touches. Automated validations that go across technology boundaries to validate end to end flow from UI to various API calls.

Once there is automation strategy and maturity achieved, its all the more important that changes don't drag you down. So often we see automation failing to provide the ROI because of the effort changes and maintenance it takes. With API testing, its all the more critical to have a sound framework in place to handle changes with minimal effort, and being able to define regression suites to business validation needs and test with maximum coverage.

Continuous API Testing

API testing can particularly be more aligned to continuous testing with flexibility to execute faster. Apart from bringing the automated executions with CI tools, API testing maturity and automation should be improved by a pre-configured validation library to test common industry-standard policies for both standard services and micro-services.

I am sure all this sounds good, and you are probably considering or already implemented it in parts. What if I tell you that there is a simpler way to get this accomplished. A simpler way that's free of custom frameworks, free of programming and technical complexities, and completely aligned to business process.

accelQ simplifies API testing with codeless natural language automation to achieve regression maturity for a true end-to-end validation.

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Take your API Testing to Regression maturity in 3 Steps - ACCELQ®

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API's are the backbone of today's digital eco-system. API's are no longer limited to just integrating applications, they host the most critical components of business in modern application architecture. API testing, unfortunately, has not matured relative to the critical importance of API's.

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70% Lower maintenance on your Test Automation

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70% Lower maintenance on your Test Automation

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Let's take a real-life scenario from one of our banking customers. Their web banking application has an upcoming release that has a combination of bug fixes, enhancements, and certain API changes. Since it's a fairly mature application, it has a repository of test assets with approximately 1000 manual test cases and 200 automation scripts. These assets are part of an ALM tool repository. These test assets in the past were tied to requirements, managed in a separate tool, however, during the years and multiple releases, the requirements traceability does not exist anymore.

Test planning is kicked off, and it's time to figure out what Test Cases are impacted in manual and automation assets. And remember in reality these test assets do not trace to Requirements.

I'm positive this situation will sound familiar to you. Change Impact is a completely manual process today which is time-consuming and error-prone. Not to mention, test cases that are not relevant, never get deleted to avoid the risk. This has a snowball effect and your test case repository is ever-expanding, giving you a false perception of quality. A higher count of test case does not relate to better coverage or higher quality. In reality, Test case count with the manual process of Change Management is misleading, and most of the effort in "maintaining" this repository is going down the drain.

Normally Test suites are manually created based on this change impact analysis. In most cases we over-test, just to be sure we lower our risk.

Adopting true Agility would mean bringing efficiency and automating this critical change management process.
Enter the era of accelQ Universe with Change Bots
accelQ approaches this uniquely at both test case scenario level as well as at the automation script level. I talk about script level change management in another post. accelQ's App universe concept bakes in the modularity and creates test scenarios that directly relate to components of application and business process. The relationships between these components are a real and direct representation of the application, its business rules and the end-to-end flow including API calls. This referential integrity is the core of bringing automation to the change management process. accelQ's change bots are able to do real-time path analysis for any business process change to exactly nail down what scenarios are impacted. Not just that, the exact step within each impacted test case is identified reducing the change management effort by 40%. And you can propagate this business process change across all your test assets knowing exactly the impact, allowing you to change logic with precision.

In addition to a Universe guided automated change management, accelQ's approach has decoupled the concept of test scenarios from test cases. Test cases in accelQ are auto-generated for all permutations and combinations needed for optimal coverage. We are challenging the whole notion of the traditional test case count driven approach and you can read more about it here. With this approach, accelQ's test cases are dynamic and change effort is relative to only scenario's representing business process under validation, and not data combinations and variations that need to be tested. Learn more about our self-healing automation that really hits the ball out of the park. Start your free trial now.

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70% Lower maintenance on your Test Automation - ACCELQ®

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Let's take a real-life scenario from one of our banking customers. Their web banking application has an upcoming release that has a combination of bug fixes, enhancements, and certain API changes. Since it's a fairly mature application, it has a repository of test assets with approximately 1000 manual test cases and 200 automation scripts.

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6 secrets for a sustainable test automation

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6 secrets for a sustainable test automation

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Lack of sustainability is the number-one reason for test automation debacles across the industry. Everything looks so rosy when you start-off on automation journey. However, a year from its implementation the value is not clear. Many teams just get pulled into the vicious cycle of automation maintenance, never deriving any real benefit. You are always in the catch-up mode to keep up your existing scripts intact. The end objective gets lost in the noise!

Here are some real-world tips to consider for achieving a sustainable automation

1. Keep test scripts simple: There is enough complexity in the application-under-test. A lot of times it feels technically fulfilling to over-optimize scripts and complicate test scenario coding. It is ok to break down the scripts to achieve one simple task at a time. If multiple data variations for the same use case navigate the application through different paths, they may be considered for separate scenarios. Use cases that may seem somewhat related, might take their own course as the application goes through changes. Rather than inserting a whole lot of logic-based statements, consider simplifying.

2. Do not jump on the record/playback wagon: Design should never be an after-thought. "Quick" results from record/playback are misleading. Understand the big picture. Abstract out various entities in the test system. Consider parameterization options and modularize the test setup. Time spent on design is worth more than you can imagine.

3. Be smart with element identification: Element Identification should not be treated as a miscellaneous activity. It is as important as coding you do for automation. Consider various best practices and ensure scripts are reasonably resilient to application changes.

4. Synchronization is central: One of the most common reasons for automation test failures is the lack of proper synchronization. Inserting a lot of hardcoded wait statements is not a solution. As much as possible, make use of implicit waits and synchronize on important elements in your application before any significant action.

5. You don't have to automate everything: Once again, the core objective of automation should be to address a fairly repeatable sequence of steps in a reliable fashion. Avoid automating corner cases that require disproportionate effort; leave it for manual testing. It is a disservice to keep running after automation %.

6. Say NO to Custom frameworks: Peripheral concern should never be a concern of automation coding. Focus on the business logic in the test scenario. Choose a tool that complements your efforts to address framework requirements. Many teams end up spending large amounts of effort managing custom frameworks that have nothing to do with the business objective

accelQ is a cloud-based continuous testing platform for functional and API testing needs. With its natural language-based interface for test development, accelQ is built for real-world challenges in test automation. Best Practices are embedded at every stage of the process and script resilience is ensured with autonomics based self-healing techniques. Sign up for a and learn more about how accelQ can complement your efforts in building a sustainable automation suite. Remember it is not about initial success, but the long-term sustainability.

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6 secrets for a sustainable test automation - ACCELQ®

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Lack of sustainability is the number-one reason for test automation debacles across the industry. Everything looks so rosy when you start-off on automation journey. However, a year from its implementation the value is not clear. Many teams just get pulled into the vicious cycle of automation maintenance, never deriving any real benefit.

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ACCELQ is a cloud-based continuous testing platform that takes care of all your functional and API testing requirements. It is next-generation codeless test automation and test management tool designed for Agile teams. It seamlessly gets integrated into your tools ecosystem, including JIRA, TFS (Team Foundation Server), and CI pipeline.

ACCELQ Application Universe

ACCELQ provides you with an application universe which is a complete blueprint of your application. With the ACCELQ Application Universe, you can visualize your application pages, transitions, and API calls from a business process perspective. While generating an application blueprint, the Universe-driven visual test design keeps business focus into account.

You can easily create the Universe through ACCELQ's behavior-driven designer, which has the predictive capability to guide you through the formation of the Universe. You can drill down to any page or Scenario in the universe to visualize its mini-universe.

The Universe enlists all the scenarios (end-to-end business process) you want to validate. The test scenarios are developed based on predictive analytics and path analytics.

You can pick a scenario to see all the steps for validation related to that particular scenario and also check the logic behind performing any validation by clicking on the step details. The logic can be in the form of simple English or a scanned view of your application.

In case your app is under development, you can write your scenarios and reconcile once the app is ready. Your automated tests will be ready along with your app code to give you push through to achieve true agile software development. Everything you write is automated, and you can also make all kinds of API calls or databases, SOAP, JMS, etc.

The best part of the Universe is that everything you do on the Universe is reusable including every page, every step logic due to which you don't have to use any custom frameworks for modularity and reusability. It comes with an embedded framework that brings modularity for faster software development and lower maintenance.

Generate Test Cases

With ACCELQ, you can auto-generate test cases for all permutations and combinations of your test data according to your business rules. It is really as simple as clicking on a single button to generate all permutations and combinations of your test cases.

Smart Handling of App Changes

As app changes are constant, ACCELQ's Universe handles all the app changes through intelligent dependency analysis. Traceability and automated change impact are built right into the process and the change bots can self heal automation at run time for any unforeseen changes in the UI which enhances the efficiency and maintenance in automation by three times.

Tracking Sprints

With ACCELQ, tracking your upcoming sprint is very easy, simple, and aligned to continuous delivery.

To get a better understanding of ACCELQ's codeless test automation platform, you can take a test drive to automate your entire quality lifecycle and experience the accelerated way to achieve higher quality in your software at a fraction of your current cost.

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ACCELQ is a cloud-based continuous testing platform that takes care of all your functional and API testing requirements. It is next-generation codeless test automation and test management tool designed for Agile teams. It seamlessly gets integrated into your tools ecosystem, including JIRA, TFS (Team Foundation Server), and CI pipeline.

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The all new next-generation manual testing tool with test tracking, traceability & integrations Only platform with Manual & Automation testing under the same hood

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Manual Tester to Automation engineer, What does it take?

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Manual Tester to Automation engineer, What does it take?

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Manual testers are solid pillars in the software testing industry. With the current automation buzz, will it continue to remain the same? Will the manual tester be replaced with automation scripts? Should manual testers switch profession? or should they scramble and join the selenium band wagon. The video is designed to simplify the answer to these questions. Check out whether the manual testers should be worried or happy.

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Manual Tester to Automation engineer, What does it take?

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AccelQ is Codeless Test Automation and Test Management platform on Cloud. OR https://www.accelq.com/blog/whats-new-accelq-3-0/

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Love Selenium ? See how accelQ complements Selenium to bring 3x speed to your automation development & maintenance. OR https://www.accelq.com/blog/accelq-selenium-match-made-heaven/

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accelQ® simplifies API testing with codeless natural language automation. It achieves regression maturity for a true end-to-end validation with API and GUI all in the same flow. OR https://www.accelq.com/blog/accelq-api-regression-automation/

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Webinar - Achieve continuous delivery with Quality Lifecycle Automation

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Webinar - Achieve continuous delivery with Quality Lifecycle Automation

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Test case automation isn't enough for Agile testing. Lets walk thru accelQ's quality lifecycle automation in this webinar. OR https://www.accelq.com/blog/agile-testing-needs-just-test-case-automation/

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Webinar - Achieve continuous delivery with Quality Lifecycle Automation

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Webinar - API & UI test automation simplified All in the same flow

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Webinar - API & UI test automation simplified All in the same flow

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Bring API test automation to mainstream, with a simplified and integrated approach OR  https://www.accelq.com/blog/api-ui-test-automation-simplified-flow/

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Webinar - API & UI test automation simplified  All in the same flow

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AccelQ Salesforce Universe - Automate 3x faster

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AccelQ Salesforce Universe - Automate 3x faster

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AccelQ Salesforce Content Pack accelerates Salesforce test automation with pre-defined Salesforce Universe, Codeless natural language automation and automated change impact analysis capabilities. Achieve over 3x acceleration in QA phase of Salesforce implementations. OR https://www.accelq.com/blog/accelq-salesforce-universe/

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accelQ Salesforce Universe - Automate 3x faster

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Cloud based Continuous Testing Platform for Functional & API Automation OR https://www.accelq.com/blog/accelq-product-overview/

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Embedded Data driven framework

Request payload created with parameterized data

Parameterize assertions with dynamic data

Automatically propagate assertions across repeated sets of response

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
accelQ® is the complete codeless test automation platform for REST, JMS, SOAP API testing. With a functional approach to API testing, execute API and UI automation in the same flow, with unparalleled simplicity

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ACCELQ is the only tool in the market with a holistic view to codeless philosophy. Most codeless test automation tools in the market today are..

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ACCELQ® is the fastest and most reliable Salesforce test automation platform with no code in-sprint automation. Easy to consume on Cloud and ready-to-go Salesforce business process Universe models enable continuous delivery at higher quality and lower costs.

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ACCELQ Manual | Next-gen Test Management

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ACCELQ Manual | Next-gen Test Management

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" Staying ahead of the rapid changes and iterations in a large-scale enterprise platform can be challenging. The ACCELQ testing platform helps us do this, with an enterprise testing platform that simply works. Through ACCELQ Universe Test Suites, Reporting, and CI/CD Integration we are able to stay ahead of the rapid changes and ensure we deliver only quality enhancements to our Platform."

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ACCELQ Manual | Next-gen Test Management

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
" Staying ahead of the rapid changes and iterations in a large-scale enterprise platform can be challenging. The ACCELQ testing platform helps us do this, with an enterprise testing platform that simply works. Through ACCELQ Universe Test Suites, Reporting, and CI/CD Integration we are able to stay ahead of the rapid changes and ensure we deliver only quality enhancements to our Platform."

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Automate web and API testing with ACCELQ

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Automate web and API testing with ACCELQ

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Universe driven visual test design keeps business focus
while generating Application blueprint

Embedded frameworks bring modularity for faster
development & lower maintenance

Predictive & Path Analysis

Develop test scenarios based on predictive analytics
and path analysis

Model UI and Data flows to maximize coverage with
auto test generation

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Automate web and API testing with ACCELQ

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Universe driven visual test design keeps business focus while generating Application blueprint Embedded frameworks bring modularity for faster development & lower maintenance Predictive & Path Analysis Develop test scenarios based on predictive analytics and path analysis Model UI and Data flows to maximize coverage with auto test generation

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Infographic to demonstrate how ACCELQ achieves acceleration and ROI in test automation compared to conventional tools such as UFT, Tricentis Tosca, Worksoft, Test Complete etc. Innovative features bring savings in every phase of automation test life cycle.

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ACCELQ services are outcome based to accelerate your Quality and truly realize the value of the product.

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Codeless Salesforce Test Automation - AccelQ

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Codeless Salesforce Test Automation - AccelQ

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AI Driven Automation Optimized for Salesforce Specific Dynamic Technology

Seamless no-code automation, handling Salesforce dynamic elements & iframes

Lightning and Classic support for all Salesforce customers

Self-healing automation reduces automation maintenance by 70%

Algorithmic & automated test case generation with Salesforce data models

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ACCELQ for Salesforce | Salesforce Testing

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AI Driven Automation Optimized for Salesforce Specific Dynamic Technology Seamless no-code automation, handling Salesforce dynamic elements & iframes Lightning and Classic support for all Salesforce customers Self-healing automation reduces automation maintenance by 70% Algorithmic & automated test case generation with Salesforce data models

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ACCELQ®: Agile test automation with Next-Gen Software QA tool

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ACCELQ®: Agile test automation with Next-Gen Software QA tool

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ADOPT TRUE AGILE QUALITY WITHOUT SILOS

Collaborate, Participate and Take Informed Decisions

Drive cross-functional ownership of Quality where manual testers and automation engineers collaborate without technical barriers. Clear visibility for Product Owners and QA Managers enabling go/no-go decisions.

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ACCELQ®: Agile test automation with Next-Gen Software QA tool - Accelq

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Collaborate, Participate and Take Informed Decisions Drive cross-functional ownership of Quality where manual testers and automation engineers collaborate without technical barriers. Clear visibility for Product Owners and QA Managers enabling go/no-go decisions.

# data[].attributes.headline
Top 3 challenges in testing Salesforce applications with Selenium

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Top 3 challenges in testing Salesforce applications with Selenium

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| Selenium is a powerful tool to automate user interactions on a browser. Here are the top three testing challenges with Selenium scripting, particular to Salesforce test automation.

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Selenium is a powerful tool to automate user interactions on a browser. A robust Selenium framework with the right design can increase test coverage and save time. This is why many organizations use Selenium for automating their application testing, including Salesforce application.

You may also want to automate your Salesforce application testing with Selenium. Especially when manual testing alone can't cover your testing requirements for regression testing. But applications built on Salesforce are pretty complex and can be challenging to test with Selenium. Here are the top three testing challenges with Selenium scripting, particular to Salesforce test automation.

1. Navigating through frames

driver.switchTo().frame(" Salesforce is a complex application with the front-end built with dynamic frames, that are able to load content independently in the current HTML document. Handling frames is difficult with Selenium as it cannot access the content directly. Normally you would require to switch the Selenium WebDriver to the frame using an attribute like
frame-attribute "); and perform actions within it. Any action that has to be performed outside this frame requires giving explicit instructions to Selenium to move out of that frame like driver.switchTo().parentFrame(); or driver.switchTo().defaultContent(); on a web page.

Frames can be handled by Selenium albeit it takes a lot of effort in finding the right attributes and script accordingly. It becomes more tedious when you deal with nested or hidden frames. As the application can have many frames, a usual 30-50 step test case can take hours of coding and usually results in a brittle script.

2. Executing against dynamic content

Like most modern web application, Salesforce has dynamic elements which do not have a fixed ID, name, class or CSS attributes. So, you cannot hard code the locator of the element. A standard method to detect the fixed part of the locator is not usually straightforward. Minor UI changes can make the tests flaky. Besides, Selenium could get into synchronization issues with element loading. And as most elements load dynamically, the test script needs to add Implicit, Explicit or Fluent Waits.

3. Handling tables

Salesforce application can have a different database driven tables. The rows are created dynamically and could be controlled by different tabs. So, simple actions like ticking a checkbox with Selenium can be quite complicated and prone to errors. Selecting the active tab may be challenging. Commands such as driver.switch_to.window and send_keys may not work reliably.

Other challenges

Salesforce applications can have complexities like Shadow DOM and pop-up windows that are not easy to test with Selenium. Selenium doesn't support such elements directly, hence requiring significant custom coding. The challenges such as test case maintenance is present with testing any complex application.

Though most of the challenges of testing Salesforce with Selenium can be solved, scripting ends up consuming a lot of time. This can impact your continuous testing goals.

Our solution

accelQ is a codeless test automation platform that allows testers to generate test cases for Salesforce with ease. It a cloud-based platform and enhances the power of Selenium making it reliable, scalable and cost-effective.

With accelQ you can overcome the challenges mentioned above without the need for programming. Learn more about our Salesforce test automation solution.

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Top 3 challenges in testing Salesforce applications with Selenium - accelQ®

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Selenium is a powerful tool to automate user interactions on a browser. A robust Selenium framework with the right design can increase test coverage and save time. This is why many organizations use Selenium for automating their application testing, including Salesforce application. You may also want to automate your Salesforce application testing with Selenium.

# data[].attributes.body
| AccelQ® is the complete codeless test automation platform for REST, JMS, SOAP API testing. With a functional approach to API testing, execute API and UI automation in the same flow, with unparalleled simplicity

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Embedded Data driven framework

Request payload created with parameterized data

Parameterize assertions with dynamic data

Automatically propagate assertions across repeated sets of response

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
accelQ® is the complete codeless test automation platform for REST, JMS, SOAP API testing. With a functional approach to API testing, execute API and UI automation in the same flow, with unparalleled simplicity

# data[].attributes.body
| AccelQ® is the fastest and most reliable Salesforce test automation platform with no code in-sprint automation. Easy to consume on Cloud and ready-to-go Salesforce business process Universe models enable continuous delivery at higher quality and lower costs.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"Staying ahead of the rapid changes and iterations in a large-scale enterprise platform can be challenging. The accelQ testing platform helps us do this, with an enterprise testing platform that simply works.

Through accelQ Universe Test Suites, Reporting, and CI/CD Integration we are able to stay ahead of the rapid changes and ensure we deliver only quality enhancements to our Platform."

- VP, TECHNOLOGY, ENTERPRISE IT

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"Staying ahead of the rapid changes and iterations in a large-scale enterprise platform can be challenging. The accelQ testing platform helps us do this, with an enterprise testing platform that simply works. Through accelQ Universe Test Suites, Reporting, and CI/CD Integration we are able to stay ahead of the rapid changes and ensure we deliver only quality enhancements to our Platform."

# data[].attributes.headline
ACCELQ®: Agile test automation with Next-Gen Software QA tool

# data[].attributes.subject
ACCELQ®: Agile test automation with Next-Gen Software QA tool

# data[].attributes.body
| AccelQ is a Agile testing platform for Functional & API Test automation. Automate 3x faster with autonomics powered codeless natural language automation.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
ADOPT TRUE AGILE QUALITY WITHOUT SILOS

Collaborate, Participate and Take Informed Decisions

Drive cross-functional ownership of Quality where manual testers and automation engineers collaborate without technical barriers. Clear visibility for Product Owners and QA Managers enabling go/no-go decisions.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
ACCELQ®: Agile test automation with Next-Gen Software QA tool - Accelq

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Collaborate, Participate and Take Informed Decisions Drive cross-functional ownership of Quality where manual testers and automation engineers collaborate without technical barriers. Clear visibility for Product Owners and QA Managers enabling go/no-go decisions.