These days, including automated testing components in your development lifecycle is a must. From catching bugs sooner to reducing time to market, automated testing tools make software development more efficient, less error-prone, and more cost effective. Bottom line—having intelligent test automation tools in your QA lineup is a no-brainer.
Yet despite its declining popularity, there’s still a time and place for manual testing. Manual testing practices are useful for exploratory testing, short lifecycle products, and for testing newly designed test cases. Manual testing can also be done on all different kinds of applications and projects, so it’s a relatively versatile practice.
But what if there was a way to combine the efficiency of automated testing with the human intervention aspects of manual testing? Intelligent test automation might be the answer.
What Is Intelligent Test Automation?
Intelligent test automation is a method of software testing that combines aspects of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) with standard test automation practices. The result is an automated testing process that is dynamic, efficient, and a higher quality than standard automated testing practices.
While traditional automated testing is process-driven and based on repetition, intelligent test automation uses a model-based approach where test cases are created and maintained automatically.
The main advantage of using AI and ML technology in software testing is that it limits the need for human intervention. Intelligent testing technology learns and improves over time, so automated testing tasks can be independently run, fixed, maintained, and analyzed.
Benefits of Intelligent Test Automation Tools
The advantages of using smart automation testing technologies are vast, but here are a few of the key benefits.
Diminish Human Intervention
By introducing intelligent testing capabilities, reliance on manual processes is reduced over time. AI and ML technologies use intelligent algorithms which can identify build issues, provide recommendations, and help with the general maintenance of your software. It’s like having a built-in QA team.
Lengthy cross-checking and manual testing take time and resources away from product development. Implementing intelligent testing allows your team to focus on what matters.
Improve Code Quality
Intelligent test automation is capable of generating smart analytics, this way test results are evaluated automatically after code is run. As if intelligent automation couldn’t get any better, AI algorithms allow you to get immediate feedback, so your team doesn’t have to shuffle through test results wondering what to do with the outcomes.
You can program your intelligent test automation to pinpoint issues and inconsistencies within your code and receive actionable feedback directly from the source. QA teams can manually validate risks or, to take it a step further, risks can be automatically validated and repaired. Talk about a win-win.
Speed Up Release Times
With intelligent test automation, teams can prioritize test cases and recycle a preferred testing framework. Targeted intelligent testing allows teams to focus on the variables that matter most and run a suite of tests based on prioritized business objectives.
And intelligent tests can be easily integrated into your CI/CD pipeline, speeding up the entire development lifecycle. This means faster product releases and a greater ROI.
The Bottom Line
Intelligent automation is about more than saving time. With AI and ML-enhanced testing, developers can enhance the entire development process.
Intelligent test automation allows you to create better scripts, maintain test cases, and generate valuable feedback. And teams can automate everything from the flow of critical feature sets to non-routine and non-replicable UI processes, enabling your team to accelerate product release timelines and deliver quality code with fewer bugs and errors.
While some autonomous testing features still need human oversight, intelligent test automation allows for more agile testing practices.
Transform Software Testing Practices with Appsurify
Appsurify leverages AI and ML technology to provide users with the ability to expedite quality testing even further. With the Appsurify TestBrain tool, QA and developers can run prioritized tests on specific commits rather than running the entire test suite.
For test-suites with a high degree of flakiness, TestBrain also can be configured to quarantine flaky tests to let CI/CD builds pass on time without failing.
Together, QA and Developers experience a more streamlined QA practice that embraces intelligence to accelerate test results by 10x and reduce CI pipeline builds times over 80% for increased output that translates into faster release schedules.
To learn more about our risk-based, intelligent test automation tools, get in touch with our team.