Self-Healing – Automate the Automation

Introduction to The Test Automation Landscape…and Beyond

It’s no secret that Software Testing was always on the backseat during the traditional ways of development. Fast forward to 2020, and testing is right next to the development phase and even goes hand-in-hand. From assuming it as ‘low priority’, it’s now become the most important aspect of software development. From manual testing to automated testing to self-healing automated testing – It’s a journey from proscriptive to prescriptive.

Why Test Automation became so important 

In an attempt to exempt testers from the time-consuming repetitive tasks, Automated testing came into existence and helped organizations achieve multiple business values like faster time to market, improved ROI and reduced testing cost and effort. The process involved an automated tool to execute a test case suite and generate detailed test reports.

However, as automation testing began to evolve, its popularity and ubiquity revealed some deficits. While the promise of automated testing was immense as it provided a greater testing efficiency, it had its associated risks from frequent changes made to the test scripts – ranging from failure of automated tests to test packages not being up-to-date. Real-time issue resolution was the need of the hour. And what better than the power combo of AI and ML to resolve this problem.

How the new age technologies – Agile, DevOps, AI and ML led to offset of Test Automation and onset of self-healing

With great power, comes great responsibility. As per World Quality Report, demands for quality-at-speed and shift-left have placed the onus of ensuring end-user satisfaction on quality assurance teams.

Imagine you are playing and you scrape your hand. Your body’s self healing mechanism kicks in and tries to heal the wound. Now, apply the same principle to software testing. 

Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence demonstrated by machines. Machine learning (ML) is the study of computer algorithms that improve automatically through experience. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. 

Mechanism of Self-healing

When new changes are introduced, either by the developer due to the ever-changing requirements or during the integration or build process, there is a chance that the automation may fail due to the predefined test scripts. It is then very difficult to identify which test cases should be modified or added. The AI ML power combo can learn if there is a change made, and then automatically modify the test automation script to fix the problem.

Webomates Self-Healing Test Automation Framework

Self-healing is Webomates forte.Webomates applies AI and ML algorithms to its self-healing test automation framework to dynamically adapt their testing scope to the changes. With such nimble-witted features, the test scripts adapt thus, making testing a lot more easier. 
There are two phases in Healing: 

There are two phases in Healing: 

1. Detection – The Test Package analyzer detects the requirements change and impact to test cases and Defect Analyzer detects script level changes/abnormalities in the existing code and automatically fixes them without human intervention. Our Test Package analyzer identifies every change during each execution. This allows you to check exactly what has changed.

2. Generation(Regeneration of test cases and scripts ) – The release notes help in identifying the test cases that need to be healed. They are available in both visual view on the top and test case format as shown below. Once analyzed, the complete test Package is modified (Test Strategy, Test Cases, Automation Test Scripts) on run time. This saves tremendous efforts on humans and provides efficient results.

Final Words

Webomates gives the developers a silver bullet with its Self-healing capability.

• Adaptability and scalability: It helps to move from defect-based resolution to real-time resolution.
• Increase in test success: The object locator identifies the changed object and fixes it resulting in lesser test failures. 
• Up-to-date Test Package: As the full regressions and modular tests include healing of the test cases and test scripts for modified features, the Test Package is updated with the new behavior of the software release. 

Empowering the QA teams with such real-time self-healing capabilities using the new-age intelligent technologies helps in realizing the true business value and also empowers the organizations in providing value to the customer.

If you are interested in learning more about Webomates’ CQ service please click here and schedule a demo, or reach out to us at info@webomates.com

Tags: AI-Automation, Automation, self healing test cases