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AI in Test Automation Tools and its Benefits | Quick Guide

Gursimran Singh | 31 May 2022

AI in Test Automation tools and its Benefits

Introduction to AI in Test Automation

Artificial Intelligence in Test automation is the utilization of specialized software to control the execution of tests and the comparison of actual outcomes with predicted results. In the past, Test Automation has changed the way things used to be. Valued as a real-time solution to meet pushing deadlines, this method is designed to deliver Customer Ready Products almost at a small amount of what it costs doing it manually. This whole growth echoes the increase in global spend occurring within test automation to fulfill the rising user expectation across specialties.
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How to implement Artificial Intelligence in Test Automation?

To address the testing challenges, consider the following elements in adopting a differentiated test automation strategy.

  • Tackle data challenges with automated test data generation and management: With the development models and tight timelines for implementation, testing data-intensive platforms are challenging. As testing teams create their data with low reusability and since test case preparations are done on a need basis, quality of data and efficiency is not analyzed. With a test automation strategy, data produced can be well used to help testing teams perform checks efficiently and introduce creative test case preparations.
  • Business-driven test coverage, with workflow based automation scenario: Automation of testing on a domain-centric application platform with multi-channel representations is overwhelming. For test automation to be effective, it is essential to know the priority of channels, the functional areas, and the tools available. New testing methodologies like BDT and Model-Based Testing (MBT) should be used. This will help in maximizing business value, and assuring that automation strategies are aligned to business objectives.
  • Speed up data migration testing with automation: Migration would not be finished without proper data migration to fit the newer scheme of things, and that is when data migration testing becomes essential. Data migration involves a high level of risk due to the volume and sensitivity of data. However, it is essential to conduct a thorough validation and utilize a test strategy to reduce risk.
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What are the benefits of AI in Testing?

The benefits of Artificial Intelligence in Testing are listed below:

Improved Accuracy

Automated testing helps by performing similar steps correctly every time they are executed and failing to miss out on recording detailed results. Testers released from repetitive manual tests have more time to create new automated software tests and deal with complex features.

Goes Beyond the Limitations of Manual Testing

It is almost impossible for the most essential QA departments to execute a web application test with 1,000+ users. With automated testing, one can recreate tens, hundreds, or thousands of virtual sets of users that can interact with a network, software, or applications.

Helps Both Developers and Testers

Shared automated tests can be utilized by developers to detect problems immediately before going to QA. Tests can run whenever source code changes are checked in and notify the team or the developer if they fail. Shared computerized tests can be utilized by engineers to get issues rapidly before going to QA. Tests can run consequently at whatever point source code changes are checked in and tell the group or the designer on the off chance that they come up short — highlights like these spare designers time and increment their certainty.

Increase in Overall Test Coverage

With automated testing, one can expand the overall depth and scope of tests resulting in an overall improvement of software quality. Automated software testing can examine the memory and file contents, internal program states and data tables to decide whether the software is behaving as it is expected to. Test automation can execute 1000+ test cases in each test run providing coverage that is not possible with manual tests.

Saving Time + Money = Faster Time to Market

With software tests being repeated every time source code is modified, manually repeating those tests can be not only time-consuming but extremely costly. In contrast, once created, automated tests can be executed again and again, with zero additional cost at a much faster pace. The software testing timespan can be reduced from days to mere hours, which translates directly into cost savings.

What are the best open-source AI in test automation tools?

The list of best open-source AI in test automation tools are below:

  • Katalon Studio
  • QA Wolf
  • Selenium
  • Appium
  • Robotium
  • Cucumber
  • Watir
  • Sikuli
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How can AI in Test Automation help for Digital Transformation?

In the time of agile and DevOps, companies are adopting to AI in Test Automation. In the digital world, retail applications are refreshed and released with better speed and quickness. AI can be very helpful in the testing industry as it improves the quality of the product and helps in a decrease of test cycle time thus delivering the product on schedule.

AI in Test Automation

AI helps in the making of test cases; the test scripts and pseudocode can be automatically generated using Artifical Intelligence. They are low on maintenance and algorithms think about test resources and give smart insights like application stability, defect hotspots, failure patterns, and failed predictions.

Usability Testing

It is essential to make sure each version of the software is compatible across devices, operating systems, and browsers. A comprehensive test automation framework is required for these situations to make sure that the user experience and functionality work across all these types. Manually testing for usability and compatibility could be time-consuming.

Security Testing

Businesses are seeming concerns about protecting the data. Test automation keeps away human errors which will be crucial with regards to ensuring the system. Another advantage is that test automation can filter large applications for vulnerabilities. In this manner, you are saving a lot of time, resource and money for the organization.

Mobile Testing

As the number of mobile devices and operating systems are growing, businesses need their applications to be of high quality and quicker time to market. Although we have various online tools to test the application basically on multiple devices, the results are not specific. To get the best outcomes, testing has to be done on real gadgets.
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What is the Role of Test Automation in Digital World?

The role of test automation in the digital world is as below:

Continuous Testing, a Critical Success Factor

To improve performance, organizations are focusing on developing application development practices and DevOps way. To help this, test execution turnarounds must be quicker, and issues, if any should be recognized rapidly. The future completion of digital transformation relies upon continuous testing for which test automation serves as a strategic business enabler.

Mitigate the Risk of Failure

Digital transformation projects include a higher risk of failure when executed without a well-defined test automation strategy. This is because manual testing cannot correctly address the varied requirements of different web browsers, devices, screen resolutions operating systems, and dynamic methods. This is where test automation comes by mitigating human mistake that can happen from repetitive testing of complex work processes.

Early Issue Identification - Agile and DevOps

In the new time of Agile and DevOps, test automation helps teams identify and resolve issues at an early stage in the lifecycle, in this way allowing enterprises to add value a lot quicker. An absence of a well-defined digital quality assurance strategy combined with test automation can be an obstacle to digital transformation success.
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Test Automation Synopsis that leverage AI

Here are some test automation synopsis that leverage AI

AI Accelerates Test Automation Process

AI uses specific sets of data presented by software developers to review software bugs and functions. By utilizing AI's automation testing, 80 - 85% of the leading workload can be refused by human testers, decreasing the stress of recurring tasks and developing coding efficiency.

AI Excludes More Defects

With the help of AI, the queries regarding when and how the bugs entered the program are kept on hold. As AI tests for bugs or defects, it also recognizes minor changes that need to improve the code. Software testers utilize the information produced by AI to manage if significant coding enhancements will be required to prevent bugs from entering the program. This improves the chance of bugs being exposed during the process of development. AI used always to test mainly to remove bugs from programs. Since AI bots don’t need to check out when a shift is over, they can work around the clock monitoring and analyzing a program.

Software Testing Becomes Simple

AI can deal with record files to save time and efforts and increase efficiency in the program. The data output produced by AI remove the theory out of the testing process and provide developers a full view of the modifications that must be executed. AI algorithms assume further complications which improve performance during testing time.

AI Stimulates an Individual's Invention

AI provides software developers an extra period to show how customers think and feel. Nowadays, coding became least interested in various application users. So, the developer must analyze a product through the vision of the customer. Companies always focus on the functionality of the application because these projects are done for the advantage of people. AI automates testing and assists testers with everyday tasks where they can focus on the possible conditions users may run when communicating with the application.

Improve Software Testing Capabilities

With AI, a group of guidance can be made to generate test data. Similarly, after having the initial data into an AI machine, different tests can be executed at each stage to assure the reliability and stability of a program. To drive the point of automation in software testing, you can easily leverage artificial intelligence in various places which includes an understanding of how APIs work, building great API test scenarios, understanding changes that have occurred, and implementing the appropriate tests at the right time.
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How AI is changing Test Automation?

AI is changing the Test Automation in following ways:

Do Visual, Automated Validation UI Testing

"Visual testing is a QA activity that is dedicated to verifying that the UI shows up correctly to users. "Visual testing is a quality confirmation movement that is intended to check that the UI. By utilizing ML-based visual validation tools, you can discover differences that human testers would most likely miss. You can create a simple machine learning test that automatically detects all the visual bugs in software. This helps validate the visual correctness without having to assert what we want it to check implicitly.

Testing APIs

Another ML change that affects how to do automation is the absence of a user interface to automate. Most of today's testing is back-end-related, not front-end-focused.

Running More Automated Tests that Matter

Many companies are utilizing AI tools that do just that. Using ML, they can tell with certainty what the smallest number of tests is to test the piece of changed code. The tools can analyze current test coverage and flag areas that have little coverage, or point out areas in the application that are at risk. What they required was an understanding of the heap of failures to determine which were new and which were duplicates. Their answer was to actualize an ML algorithm that established a "fingerprint" of test case failures by comparing them with the system and debug logs, so the algorithm could predict which errors were duplicates.

Spidering AI

The most popular AI automation area now is using machine learning to write tests for application by spidering automatically. When the tool runs, it thinks about its present state to all the known patterns it has already learned. If there is a deviation (for example, a page that usually doesn't have JavaScript errors but now does), a visual difference, or an issue of running slower than average, the tool will banner that as a potential issue.

Creating More Reliable Automated Tests

How often do tests fail due to developers making changes to your application, such as renaming a field ID? It happens to me all the time. But tools can use machine learning to adjust to these changes automatically. This causes tests more maintainable and reliable. So something that we did was to build a more intelligent method of referring to front-end components in test automation with the goal that those kinds of changes don't break your tests."

Become a Domain Model Expert

Having the capacity to train an ML algorithm requires that think with a testing model. This activity needs somebody with domain knowledge; many automation engineers are getting involved with making models to help with the development try. With the change, there is a requirement for people who not only know how to automate but who can analyze and understand complex data structures, statistics, and algorithms.
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How to implement Test Automation?

In the AI testing industry, companies are hiring AI algorithm experts to help implement AI in their automation tools using learning algorithms like
  • Deep Neural networks
  • Decision tree learning
  • Inductive logic programming
  • Clustering
  • Bayesian networks etc
They are using some to the concepts from the above algorithms to implement intelligent AI based testing systems. Secondly, there are different problems with automation; companies are trying to solve currently, to name a few we have-
  • Authoring and ExecutionStability
  • Maintenance
  • CI/CD Integration
  • Need for Skilled resources

To fix all these problems, we need to collect massive amounts of data like how many test passed/failed, how many tests were run, how much time a user spends in creating/executing test cases, what kind of screenshots are generated from the tests and what information they can offer, how much time a user spends with an automation tool before going to another tool, how were tests authored, how reusable the tests are, etc. We need massive computing power to process all this data. Once we collect all this data, we come up with many training data sets to train the AI.

All this falls under the bucket of “Supervised Learning” where we are giving the right data to train the AI, and we see what kind of outcomes the AI comes up with based on various training sets. To give you a simple example - Netflix and Amazon use this concept of supervised learning to come up with recommendations for movies and tv shows. They collect data on user preferences and multiple other user actions; then the AI recommends a set of movies/tv shows based on their usage patterns. So, this is kind of the direction companies are taking to implement AI in their automation tools. Some of the popular AI based automation tools which are already out there are-

Which tool is used for Automation Testing?

Top 10 tools for Testing Automation are listed below:

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Conclusion

When the initial investment to set up an AI system in test automation is made, organizations will be able to create testing rewards for less money. These savings can be invested in increased QA innovation efforts like testing uncovered areas and giving more time to exploratory testing. An excellent way to approach this would be through retraining humans while monitoring AI bots and their results. Over the long run, artificial intelligence will be able to help not simply software testers attempting to convey top-quality products to the market, but all jobs associated with software development. Hence, human testers don’t have to worry about their careers becoming out of date. By working in concert with AI in the future, human testers will see the most exciting and valued aspects of testing open up. The most ideal route forward is for humans and machines to exist simultaneously, leaning on each other’s strengths.

Keep Learning

Test Automation in the digital world helps companies to optimize and fasten their automation processes which further help to serve the clients efficiently. To know more about Test Automation in Digital World,  we advise taking the following steps –