Insights

Test Automation: Bringing Automation to Quality Assurance

December 23, 2020
Test Automation: Bringing Automation to Quality Assurance
A Test Automation approach improves the overall quality of software development while synchronising tools, people and processes, and reducing testing costs.

|---Module:text|Size:Small---|

Quality: A Paradigm Shift

In the quest to deliver quicker and better solutions to tackle customers’ increasing needs and requirements, organisations are aligning their software development and Quality Assurance practices to achieve high-quality products that can be delivered in shorter cycle times.

More than ever, having a robust and effective Quality Assurance process is critical to systematically assess software quality and detect defects in the development lifecycle. In fact, in a digitally-led world, successful companies are those that bear high levels of quality when quickly turning an idea into a product or service, while also improving work processes and guaranteeing efficiency to better compete in an increasingly crowded market.

As part of a Quality Assurance process, testing is a crucial stage in a software development lifecycle to ensure that a good, accurate and reliable software is created. Beyond detecting and correcting defects, testing helps organisations understand the actual versus the expected outcome on a given solution, so that they can improve the quality of their products, either from a functional or non-functional perspective, to meet business and user goals.

The increase of Agile and DevOps practices raises companies’ willingness to embrace automation in software testing, to assure a continuous incremental pace for software creation and development, improve solutions’ time-to-market and increase efficiency.

Agile methodologies promote continuous iteration of development and testing throughout the software development lifecycle, reducing the suitability of manual activities in keeping up with the pace of digital transformation. Moreover, synchronising development and operations, DevOps promises faster development and deployment of more reliable software because testing is embedded into each development cycle.

How Quality Assurance and Testing combines with different Delivery Methodologies

 |---Module:text|Color:red|Size:Small---|

Waterfall Solution Framework:

|---Module:text|Size:Small---|

  • automation decisions according to delivery and test strategies;
  • automated test cases deployment to the development pipeline for automatic, scheduled or on-demand trigger.

 |---Module:text|Color:red|Size:Small---|

Celfocus Agility Flow:

|---Module:text|Size:Small---|

  • team involvement and proximity to the quality process;
  • collaborative ownership of the quality and testing aspects;

 |---Module:text|Color:red|Size:Small---|

DevOps Delivery Approach:

|---Module:text|Size:Small---|

  • fully devOps-enabled;
  • seamless CI/CD integration;
  • ability to setup and deliver relevant automated test cases in due time.

Celfocus Test Automation

As quality becomes more and more critical to delivering high-quality software, test automation gains more relevance, stemming from the evolution of software and applications’ technical and functional requirements and businesses’ ever-increasing dependency on technology.

As an independent team, Celfocus Quality Assurance engineers ensure that the delivered software fulfils its requirements and also provide delivery teams with accurate and useful quality-related risk management information on time.

Celfocus’s knowledge and experience in testing, combined with great flexibility to adapt to different quality approaches by accommodating a set of practices and tools, puts the company in a unique position to bring automation to Quality Assurance processes.

|---Module:image|Size:Small---|

|---Module:text|Size:Small---|

Celfocus Automated Testing Framework (ATF)

A technology-agnostic framework suitable for complete and complex testing systems by applying industry best practices and standards, enabling teams to design and implement rapid, robust, scalable and easily configurable scenarios for multiple testing environments, with low maintenance effort.

Test suites can be triggered to run automatically with every release, promoting continuous testing under continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) contexts, or on request to be executed at desired times and frequencies.

ATF decouples test design from execution, allowing the test to be implemented after its design, though only executed when required.

|---Module:image|Size:Small---|

Benefits:

|---Module:text|Size:Small---|

  • Intelligent test automation;
  • Continuous delivery;
  • Better time-to-market;
  • Simplified infrastructure;
  • Customer satisfaction.

|---Module:text|Color:red|Size:Small---|

Case Study

|---Module:text|Size:Small---|

Optimising Release Testing Through Automation

Siebel is one of Vodafone Portugal’s BSS core IT system. Its upgrade was a critical piece to continue unleashing the value of the undergoing company’s digital transformation.

Testing was an essential part of the update project as predominantly manual testing activities resulted in thorough and time-consuming software releases, as well as unproductive human resources management.

Vodafone Portugal and Celfocus built an automated testing ecosystem following the Agile Scrum methodology by using Celfocus Automated Testing Framework to automate Siebel regression tests.

As a result, validation cycles were shortened and manual activities reduced to the essential.

|---Module:text|Color:red|Size:Small---|

In a nutshell:

|---Module:text|Size:Small---|

  • Automation of 377 test cases;
  • 30 continuous testing pipelines created for different scopes;
  • TDM (Test Data Management, Vodafone Portugal proprietary) integration to feed complex test data requests.

Automation

Agile

Written by
Download White Paper
Ready for a deep dive?

Test Automation