Test Automation for Beginners

There are two kinds of testing in the world of software—manual and automated. Some types of manual testing, such as discovery testing and usability testing, are invaluable. You can do other kinds of testing—like regression testing and functional testing—manually, but it’s a fairly wasteful practice for humans to keep doing the same thing over and over again. It’s these kinds of repetitive tests that lend themselves to test automation.

Test automation is the practice of running tests automatically, managing test data, and utilizing results to improve software quality. It’s primarily a quality assurance measure, but its activities involve the commitment of the entire software production team. From business analysts to developers and DevOps engineers, getting the most out of test automation takes the inclusion of everyone.

Selenium WebDriver is a web framework that permits you to execute cross-browser tests. This tool is used for automating web-based application testing to verify that it performs expectedly. Selenium WebDriver allows you to choose a programming language to create test scripts.

TestNG is an automation testing framework in which NG stands for “Next Generation”. TestNG is inspired by JUnit which uses the annotations (@). TestNG overcomes the disadvantages of JUnit and is designed to make end-to-end testing easy.

Using TestNG, you can generate a proper report, and you can easily come to know how many test cases are passed, failed, and skipped. You can execute the failed test cases separately.

For example:

• Suppose, you have five test cases, one method is written for each test case (Assume that the program is written using the main method without using testNG). When you run this program first, three methods are executed successfully, and the fourth method is failed. Then correct the errors present in the fourth method, now you want to run only fourth method because first three methods are anyway executed successfully. This is not possible without using TestNG.
• The TestNG in Selenium provides an option, i.e., testng-failed.xml file in test-output folder. If you want to run only failed test cases means you run this XML file. It will execute only failed test cases.

Beside above concept, you will learn more on TestNG, like what are the Advantages of TestNG, how to create test methods using @test annotations, how to convert these classes into testing suite file and execute through the eclipse as well as from the command line.