Day 4: What kind of testing can automation support you with?

Unit testing comes to my mind as the first one.It helps me as a tester in a way that I let developers do the deeds and learn to trust they do things right. Even reviewing the unit test code is actually a neat learning experience, once you get to understand the unit test logic.

Functional testing during or right after the build, can also be done by same unit testing approaches, which is also a neat way to verify the functionality. The benefits on that one is that the code is readable by the developer who wrote it and (in case it’s not made with Perl) even with other members of the team or company. To have the tests usable and readable in the same IDE developers use, leads also to easier debugging. What usually lacks is decent reporting, but then again, all we need to know that it fails when it should and passes when everything really is OK.

Mocking the test environment and harnessing the SUT. They walk hand in hand. There’s plenty of nice mocking tools, wiremock for example. One might also re-invent the wheel here. I mean the mock can be just a file you fetch from another system or write yourself. Does not sound too much automating, though 😀

Load testing is also one of the standard ones to be used with automation. Given the powers of the servers, new container technologies and distributed load testing services, you can build your own solution or use a ready made service, like blazemeter or octoperf.

Repetitive functionality tests, regression tests and release tests in any step of the development process are good to automate, given that you are going to use the automation more than few times.

Then the whole world of Continuous Delivery and Continuous Integration. It will not happen properly if you do not have the right tests put in right places. Well it might be OK to let the users test the product, but that would mean that you should have an automated monitoring system that gathers the data you will need. That’s also one way of automation that will help.

And of course all of the test data generating tools, self-made or otherwise, bash- or python -scripts for setting up the environments together with containers and their managing tools (docker, docker-compose and kubernetes to start with).

I most likely am missing something here, still. I mean where do you draw the line when it comes to automation in testing? Is it only the testing tools (like jMeter, Robot Framework etc.) or the tools that let you yourself automate mundane tasks to ease your testing process.