Functional Test Automation – QA Automation

Quality assurance (QA) automation is critical for the successful implementation of technical projects. Once established, high-quality, automated testing ensures the quality of the development process and its results.

SoHo's banking-industry client had an established QA process in place for the intranet websites that powered their internal communications and data management. But this was a manual QA workflow.

Sub-optimal QA automation affects the bottom line

On reviewing their project, the client identified this workflow as one that was:

• Contributing to rising costs – with an expanding application suite, the cost to maintain the in-house manual QA team was growing, and growth was projected to continue
• Negatively impacting development to production pipeline – the process was inefficient

As a result, the QA process was eroding the development team’s ability to quickly provide the customizations required by the business.

SoHo agreed with the assessment and noted two further issues:

• No mechanism for generating early QA reports
• Limited documentation and isolation of test scripts

SoHo leveraged a test automation framework in Selenium. The Selenium framework is an ideal choice as it provides a robust suite of automation testing tools that are highly customizable. Selenium supports a full regression suite, which SoHo implemented.

Selenium’s browser-based plugin was used to record and test steps and play them back to testers and developers. The generated HTML-based files provide a record of all the steps taken and provide the basis for future regression tests.

Using Selenium’s WebDriver is a robust way to implement automation testing. Also, it accommodates multiple test languages for automated testing. SoHo created the testing framework in Java for quick and efficient testing.

The client’s QA process is fully automated and runs directly on the target web page. This automation allowed for a significant increase in the number of test cases. Also, the solution massively simplifies the reuse of tests to ensure that no erosion of functionality has occurred.

Optimized QA automation strategies improve ROI

The client has an efficient, automated QA automation system in place. As a result of this project, SoHo’s client enjoys a significant improvement in their ROI, seeing:

• Improved product quality
• Optimized development cycle by 30–40%
• Reduced development costs by 30%
• Instant QA reports for developer analysis
• Better informed estimates of product delivery times
• Automated recording of test outcomes
• Full regression suite
• Comprehensive documentation
• Increased number of tests