Moving from manual to automated testing

The software development industry is evolving fast, and every time we have to do more, better and faster and how can we do that? it’s simple, with automation.

In most of the companies I have worked on, there is no such thing as “moving” from manual to automated testing, because manual testing is still require but in smaller amounts. In some companies they have a very structured team and dedicated persons to automation tasks that only do automated testing.

In this moment it’s important to notice the difference between Automated Testing and Test Automation. Automated Testing is the act of performing automated tests, for example we have a test suite and we took all the test cases and write automated test scripts for those cases. In the other hand Test Automation refers to automate the test process and that implicates to automate the launch of the test without human intervention and the process of reporting bugs, tracking and managing the tests automatically.

In a traditional environment testing was done at the end of the development process prior to go to production, but right now as more companies are implementing continuos integration and delivery and the product needs to be constantly in testing, it’s critical that you can automate for optimize your time and resources and have access to a better job opportunities.

To start automating tests we will need some specific knowledge and tools, at least basic understanding, I would recommend some tools but it’s just a recommendation, for example if you already know a tool different than the one recommended here, you can go ahead and speeds up the process or you can choose to learn a new tool, it’s up to you.

We will need the following:

* Scripting language (basic, recommended: JavaScript)

* Programming language (basic-intermediate, recommended: Python)

* Version control (basic, recommended: Git)

* Automated GUI testing tool (basic-intermediate, recommended: Selenium Webdriver)

So far all the above will be your starting point for automated GUI testing, you can later incorporate more tools and frameworks to complement the test types and to increase test coverage.