Lunch and Learn Series: Automated Testing

This week’s lunch and learn is brought to you by SOLTECH’s very own QA Automation Engineer, Victor Silva.

Manual software testing is exactly what it sounds like: a human sitting in front of a computer meticulously combing through each screen, looking for bugs or weaknesses. This process is repeated over and over throughout the development process, and it takes for-ev-er. On the other hand, automated tests walk beside you, telling you immediately if you’re going to encounter an issue and where the problem is.

Automated testing is obviously popular among developers. Here are a few of SOLTECH developers telling us how they benefit from automated testing:

“It’s easy to take shortcuts and miss bugs if you have to manually test an app, automation makes sure that nothing is missed. Even innocuous changes to one feature could affect another feature that a tester might not think of, but automation allows you to test everything quickly.”

“I get bugs filed to me faster, which allows us to speed up development. The only downside is that if there is some breaking change through the application I feel like automation isn’t necessarily the best at indicating what the actual cause is, mostly just that stuff doesn’t work but I’m sure that holds pretty true with any QA resource-Absolutely.”

“I would definitely say it’s faster in the long run and allows testing to cover the entire application every time you want to run a test as opposed to manually.”

Here are a few other benefits that extend past just what a developer enjoys about automated testing, into what a consumer or business owner may be looking to achieve:

Automated testing software tools are in no short supply, but not all software is created equal. Here are a few of the best tools for automated testing, according to Victor (and a few other SOLTECH developers):

To wrap up: testing is a great tool, not an annoying overhead. It’s a way of helping give faster feedback to write better code, make fewer mistakes, and avoid bug creep. In some cases, manual testing is preferable, but automated testing clears the road as we travel and allows for faster production time and fewer resources needed, saving money – among many other things.

Thanks for stopping by our lunch and learn! We hope you enjoyed learning about the benefits of Automated Testing as much as we did.

At SOLTECH, we’re doing what we love, and we love to talk about it. Our engineers use a myriad of methodologies, like automated testing, to create amazing software solutions for individuals with awesome app ideas, all the way to enterprise systems for Fortune 500 companies.

We love hearing from our fellow software engineers. If you have anything to add to our lunch and learn, tell us in the comments. And, if you’re looking to get your software idea off the ground, we want to hear from you, too!