What is self-healing Test automation?
Those drawbacks are overcome through self-healing Test automation.
It is a testing mechanism that detects object changes in the product and intuitively updates with new attributes to ensure test cases are functional.
Self-healing Test automation tools not only help reduce downtime and improve the speed of development but testing teams and QA services can also achieve greater efficiency by creating basic automation scripts for multiple applications.
Importance of self-healing
The mechanism helps reap the following benefits, too.
Fewer failed tests
Let’s say your Testing team decides to schedule the Test automation suite to run during the night to collect the results the next day, when you also plan to create new Test cases.
Next morning, you discover the automation Tests stopped working.
That the tests might fail is not much of a surprise to testers. At times, however, a change in an application’s UI could be the cause of a failed Test.
Prevent Test flakiness
A flaky Test makes it challenging for Testing teams to identify if or not their tests are stable.
By ensuring the Test design is up to date with the application, Tests are less likely to fail during execution while execution flows more seamlessly too.
Save time and effort
Changes in the test code is relative to the changes made by the developer in the application.
For example, if a developer has changed the ID or Class attributes on a webpage, the corresponding changes must be made in the Test script, too. The sticking point is this: if changes in the application are aplenty, testers would need to make as many changes in the Test script and run them.
Self-healing mechanism saves Testing teams time and effort by detecting the change and updating the test cases for every change made in the user interface.
It not only saves time and effort for Agile and development teams, but significantly reduces cost, too.
How to approach yourself healing
Application awareness
Knowing the application inside-out is one of the core principles. Easy to enable self-healing mechanisms in the automation framework, a lot of time can be lost if the production problem in the application is not identified before.
Prevention is better than medication
Exactly! Although it might be fun to automatically recover from error cases, preventing it before is the best choice. It is important to identify the main problem and overcome the root causes.
So, is the automation of the healing test the next big thing in QA?
Software testing is and will continue to evolve with artificial intelligence automation tasks that traditionally require human cognition and involve independent learning.
However, smart testing technology without AI's help will continue to play a key role in software testing.
