Coding in QA automation

QA Automation is an engineering role that requires a very high understanding of modern technology. It needs numerous skill sets to take this position as the role must be knowledgeable in writing software codes in many popular languages with different types of methodologies in technology.

Coding in QA automation

Highly skilled quality assurance engineers with bachelor's degrees in computer science, fluent in communication and software programming abilities are often desired in this position. As they can develop the right testing framework custom made for the project and can easily find bugs following the best practices in software development life cycle as these engineers can determine what needs to be tested based on their training and past experiences.

Impact of manual testing

Manual QA testing is very important work where it requires out of the box thinking based on the domain knowledge of the product. They can easily catch bugs in the early stages of the product development which is needed to get fixed by the software engineer. Most of the time, the manual testing requires 1 or more people to complete the test and they must be managed by the QA lead. They are incharge of developing and marking the test result of the test procedures either Passed, Failed or Blocked. In cases when a defect is encountered the tester must investigate the issue very well by making sure it’s reproducible and a valid issue to report to the software engineers. Once the bug is fixed the defect will be retested for verification. Running repetitive regression tests in manual testing is not ideal since this can be automated to save time and work effort. When the application becomes larger, the manual test becomes difficult to complete due to the number of test cases that need to be executed. Adding more people to work in testing is not desirable as this will add project cost and this is not the best practice to solve the problem and complete the test coverage.

Impact of test automation

QA Automation Engineer plays a useful job to the tech company as this will help in automating the limitations of manual testing for the large scale application. It understands the deeper functionality of the system as they can read and write software programs. White box testing should not be a problem when reviewing the product code for this role. The quality engineer is knowledgeable enough to read the code and follow the coding standards. The position is also responsible for maintaining and running the automation framework for integration tests or end to end tests in parallel execution. Including the collection of the test results and sending the automated test report in real time to the QA lead, Managers or Stakeholders. Troubleshooting the automated test to make the process faster and make the performance better is part of the job responsibility. The automation tests catch regression bugs due to the changes of the code or when there are new features added. The issue can be in the UI, Email, API, SQL, Security, Performance, Accessibility, and Command Line Interface.

Test automation tooling

There are many automation tools that can be used for free. Selenium Webdriver, Webdriver.io and Appium are the popular UI test automation tools that can be written in Python, C#, Java, and Javascript for Web, and Mobile. Visual Regression is also possible by using Sikuli, and NPM JS Image Comparison Libraries. Postman is a tool for the API but there is also a library called Fetch in Javascript that can communicate with the services where it can do the get,  post, put,  and delete requests. Fetch has multiple purposes including getting the header responses and adding a JSON payload in the body. For Security testing we can use the Cyber Security Standards, NIST, Microsoft Security Tools, and Fuzzer. CloudFlare is useful for websites to add additional security layers especially against denial of service attacks. The performance testing tools can be Locust, and JMeter. Mysql is a database management system for the users to view the data but we can also access it with the use of the Command Line Interface and a Node.js library which can be Yargs or mysql libraries depending on the setup. Adding the behavior driven development with the use of specflow, and gherkins will help the collaboration of the QA team and the customer on understanding the purpose of the script by reading the given, when, and then which are based on the test cases and the acceptance criteria. With the DevOps process this will help in making the test procedures faster as this can detect issues upon committing the code. Running the automation test can be scheduled with the use of Circle CI for continuous integration, and deployment. Version control is required for code management and repositories such as Github.

Qualities of a software engineer in test

To be an effective QA Automation engineer and to program a software enable to create a QA automation framework, the person must need to understand the fundamentals of Quality Assurance by attending training, do research, self study and practice on testing products as well as get certified with ISTQB. Next is to determine the testing tool that will be used by the team, It can be Selenium, Appium, or Request Library. A person can learn how to program software by attending a class, reading a book, or watching e-learning videos. To start on having the knowledge in software programming this will depend on the chosen language. It could be Python, C#, Go, Java, and Javascript. Object Oriented Programming is a must as this is a fundamental requirement to write the code. After learning how to program, the QA programmer must apply it to the project to exercise the skill and write the code in framework development so that the functions can be reusable. It is also better to work with a team so that the code can be peer reviewed. There are many ways to automate the software but we normally follow the best practices and the most reliable tools available from the open source community or from the private entity such as katalon and test studio from microsoft. Without test automation detecting bugs due to code changes would be difficult to find especially for large applications. As technology continues to grow rapidly, more QA automation engineers are needed in every company and country as they will help to lessen the project cost and help in leading the product to be successful.