Best way to choose a test automation tool
It's easy to get caught up in enthusiasm for the 'silver bullet'
of test automation, where the dream is that a single mouse click can
initialize thorough unattended testing of an entire software application, bugs
will be automatically reported, and easy-to-understand summary reports
will be waiting in the manager's in-box in the morning.
Although that may in fact be possible in some situations, it is not the way
things generally play out.
In manual testing, the test engineer exercises software functionality to
determine if the software is behaving in an expected way. This means that
the tester must be able to judge what the expected outcome of a test should
be, such as expected data outputs, screen messages, changes in the
appearance of a User Interface, XML files, database changes, etc.
In an automated test, the computer does not have human-like 'judgement'
capabilities to determine whether or not a test outcome was correct.
This means there must be a mechanism by which the computer can
do an automatic comparison between actual and expected results
for every automated test scenario and unambiguously make a pass
or fail determination. This factor may require a significant
change in the entire approach to testing, since in manual
testing a human is involved and can:
- make mental adjustments to expected test results based
on variations in the pre-test state of the software system
- often make on-the-fly adjustments, if needed, to data
used in the test
- make pass/fail judgements about results of each test
- make quick judgements and adjustments for changes to requirements.
- make a wide variety of other types of judgements and adjustments
as needed.
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