Within the DevOps and Agile communities, automation testing has become essential.
In the long term, efficient automation testing can improve system quality overall and be a fantastic productivity booster for the testing team. The hardest part of starting with test automation is ensuring that it is used properly.
Test automation setup is not simple, as anyone who has tried to do so may attest.
According to the State of Test Automation 2020-2021 Survey by Kobiton, picking the right tool is the main problem for 25.9% of the firms, followed by establishing the proper test automation approach, and so on.
The top major issues with automation testing that developers and organizations experience are covered in this article on the subject, along with suggestions for how to solve them.
Why Is The Importance Of Automation Testing?
The primary goal of automated testing is to produce a superior product with outstanding performance that comes with several benefits. With a quicker Time to Market (TTM), it leads to a significant decrease in maintenance expenses and a significant improvement in software performance. Budget-wise, the value of automation testing resides in cost savings because human labor is no longer necessary for tasks other than maintaining the test. Using scripts, automated testing seeks to make testing as easy as possible.
Major Challenges With Automation Testing
One of the crucial elements in a software development company is a strong continuous testing strategy. End-to-end automated testing, which is required for continuous testing, enables a better understanding of application quality early in the development cycle.
It certainly is as great as it sounds. Moving to an automated testing technique, however, frequently requires dealing with common errors that can make this phase unpleasant, just like with any other development process. What challenges would a DevOps team encounter when trying to implement an effective automated testing strategy? Let’s examine them in greater detail.
Having Effective Teamwork And Communication
Lack of teamwork and communication is one of the key challenges with automation testing. Automation testing depends heavily on efficient communication between all stakeholders because it is expensive and provides long-term ROI (Return on Investment) rather than immediate gratification.
The test cases that need to be automated and the required capabilities should be discussed by business analysts, developers, and project managers. Making a plan that would satisfy all the parties is challenging. Making the improvements to the product is a difficult undertaking because management must approve the strategic timeline.
Choosing The Framework And Tool
Selecting the right automation technology presents a significant challenge to the efficacy of automation testing. It’s difficult to choose which tool to use because there are so many available options, both licensed and open-source. The choice of the tool depends on the type of application and the level of automation testing. Automation ultimately fails regardless of our testing approach if we do not have a product that meets the business requirement. The most common causes of test automation failure are various.
The grid of devices used is an essential component of this automation testing architecture. Without running the tests on actual devices to simulate real user conditions, testing can never be comprehensive. Unfortunately, establishing an actual device lab is costly, time-consuming, and needs frequent updates. A wonderful choice might be to choose an actual device cloud.
You can execute automation testing on over 3000 real devices running on genuine operating systems by selecting cloud-based infrastructure platforms. Users can test locally or publicly hosted web applications using this cross-browser testing platform on a variety of devices, operating systems, and browsers.
Cross-Browser Evaluation
Our website may occasionally respond differently depending on the browser being used, with the chance that it functions properly in Chrome but not in Firefox. Performing test automation on every browser may not be viable given the variety of browsers available today. However, we still need to make sure that the test application works flawlessly across the most popular browsers, including Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, and IE. Testing on popular browsers alone is still insufficient; we may also need to test on popular browser versions, as well as on various operating systems and resolutions. This tactic, which may be summed up as cross-browser testing, makes it difficult for testers to automate tests.
Scalability
Test scalability is the main issue with automation. It is crucial to test across a variety of browsers, operating systems, and resolutions, as was described in the paragraph before. Selenium WebDriver allows us to run tests sequentially, but it does not offer a practical approach for cross-browser testing. The number of features being tested in the application may grow over time, requiring the development of new test cases. Running multiple test cases in succession could also have issues.
Selenium has created Selenium Grid as a solution to this problem, allowing us to test our web applications on a variety of OS and browser combinations. However, Selenium Grid would only assist in Cross Browser Testing on the actual machines or browsers that we have, making it difficult for testers to do automated tests on a large scale.
Coordinating Events
Sync issues are one of the key reasons our automation scripts fail. Synchronization issues may manifest when we expect an event to occur. However, it can take longer or might not happen at all, which exacerbates the failure of our test scenario. As an illustration, when we run an automation script and the website loads for the first time, we expect an “accept/decline cookies” notice to display; however, it either appeared late or not at all. It is because of synchronization that our test script fails. Developers typically employ waits from Selenium, such as Implicit wait and Explicit wait, to address this.
Handling Dynamic Elements
High-tech websites that are brand-new may include dynamic material that evolves. Even websites with global accessibility could have content that is user-specific.
An e-commerce platform like Amazon, for instance, updates its catalog over time and responds differently with different materials in different areas. Selenium makes it difficult to automate these web apps since the locators we have used might not communicate with the web elements. AJAX-based web content might occasionally load slowly, which raises the possibility of test script failure. As previously indicated, waits like Implicit wait and Explicit wait that is integrated with Selenium can be useful in certain circumstances. For managing dynamic online material, we can even design our own bespoke or dynamic XPath.
Results With False Positives And False Negatives
Automation testers have always had nightmares about False Positive and False Negative outcomes. False Positive describes the situation where we encounter errors in our test cases even while the application being tested functions well. False-negative findings refer to the circumstance where we receive positive test case results yet the application being tested is faulty. Such fecklessness misled the testing team, and the communication gap between the development team and the QA team widened. Automation testers must overcome the difficulty of handling flaky tests.
You must ensure that the test strategies, test cases, and testing environment are managed appropriately and systematically to overcome this flakiness.
Handling Pop-Ups And Alerts
While using a web application, various popup and alert types may appear.
- Notifications at the browser level include things like “Allow/Decline camera access,” “Allow/Decline microphone access,” etc. These notifications are made at the browser level, and each browser handles them differently. Chrome options can apply to the Chrome web browser. Similarly, FirefoxOptions/FirefoxProfile can be used with the Firefox browser.
- Alerts sent via the internet include things like “This site says….” and “Do you want to leave this site?” The Selenium class “Alerts,” which includes many methods like ignore() and accept(), can handle these notifications.
- Because Selenium’s capabilities are solely limited to web interaction, it is not possible to handle OS level interactions with Selenium. These pop-ups fall within the category of flash objects, which Selenium Locators cannot access. It is usual practice to interact with these pop-ups using the “Robot” class.
It’s challenging to manage the problem of native pop-ups while dealing with a web application because various popup and notifications appear. Few Popups and Alerts can be handled by yourself.
Handling Of Captcha Or OTP
As far as you are aware, neither can be anticipated or predicted because the values of the OTP and Captcha are always changing. Automating services like payment gateways and new user registrations, which require Captcha and OTP, is challenging for automation testers. This can also be seen as evidence that manual testing cannot be completely eliminated or automated out of an application.
Low-Volume Reporting
In the testing phase, reporting is quite important. Test reports create a bridge between developers and testers. Selenium doesn’t currently offer many reporting features. The largest challenge for automation testers is writing and maintaining reports.
For our superior code designs and reporting, we typically use frameworks that are based on programming languages. TestNG and Gauge are two instances of Java frameworks that offer helpful reports. The Pytest framework for Python can be compared in this way.
Only Desktop Browsers Allowed Testing
Selenium is a widely used portable framework for testing online applications, and this cannot be disputed. However, neither mobile web applications nor native mobile applications are supported by it. For this, we have “Appium,” a different open-source framework that is a relative of Selenium.
A popular framework for testing online and mobile apps for iOS and Android is Appium. When working for a software testing organization, the hardest aspect for automation testers in this situation must develop various drivers and scripts for testing a single web application in the same browser on desktop and mobile.
Issue With Timeout Or Sync
One of the most frequent problems in Selenium test automation, whether you call it a timeout or sync issue, is timeout and sync issues. Much of your testing script may fail if you don’t handle this problem appropriately. It has even been repeatedly demonstrated that while automating testing, almost 80% of scripts fail because of an incorrect sync.
Issues With Page Loading
A web app may contain some user-specific web pages that load various components based on the user. Even some aspects can be customized to the user’s past behavior. Thus, selenium tests occasionally may not function properly.
Issue With Test Flakiness
When tests produce inconsistent findings over several runs, they are considered to be flaky. Sometimes they succeed and other times they don’t. Test flakiness can occur for a variety of causes. For instance, a dynamic UI element undergoing validation requires some time to load on the screen. Sometimes it shows up right on time, other times it takes longer, and by then the test declares it a failure.
Smart Locators
We must continue to improve our xpath and css for script stability since, as we all know, locators are the foundation of any scripting; otherwise, there is a very high likelihood that the script will fail in next updates.
Framework Improvement And Upkeep
We constantly work on the framework, but creating and maintaining it requires an ongoing addition of new features or libraries in order to reduce execution time and maintenance effort.
Performing Automation Testing With LambdaTest
Cloud-based infrastructure such as LambdaTest allow you to step up your Selenium automation testing. LambdaTest is an intelligent digital experience testing cloud that offers numerous benefits to businesses aiming to reduce time to market and enhance their testing processes. By enabling faster test execution and ensuring high-quality releases, LambdaTest plays a crucial role in accelerating digital transformation initiatives. With its extensive range of features and capabilities, it has become a preferred choice among cloud testing platforms.
One of the standout features of LambdaTest is its ability to perform both real-time and automation testing across a staggering 3000+ environments and real mobile devices. This wide coverage ensures that businesses can thoroughly test their web applications across various browsers, operating systems, and devices, providing confidence in their application’s compatibility and performance.
Wrapping it up
You would have difficulties in the IT industry because of how quickly technology is developing. Testing professionals using other testing tools, such as QTP, Katalon, Ranorex, etc., are also experiencing difficulties in their respective projects besides Selenium-based testers. But as nothing in this world is flawless, every excellent thing has some drawbacks as well. Here you will also get a fix for the aforementioned problems that can be useful for your ongoing projects. In addition, you can communicate with people in a variety of testing communities to learn how they overcame difficulties.
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