In a competitive world Speeding up your testing cycle can be the prominent difference between being dominant in the market and satisfying the customer. Due to the ever-increasing rate of a new device or a new version of a browser or operating system in the market, comprehensive testing has become one of the primary challenges for any organization.
They all want good test coverage for their application in shorter cycle times. And the Pressure to produce rigorously tested applications and accelerate release timelines is growing immensely as users don’t expect to wait around for updates, fixes, or new features.
Organizations must find ways to speed up the test cycles, improve test quality and stay competitive in a tough environment. A major reason why so many tests fail is that they take too long to run. The longer it takes to run, the more likely it is to end with a failure.
There is always a need for speed. Development and testing must be completed more quickly, and issues must be resolved more quickly. Nowadays users expect instant change and new releases, and a long application release cycle is unfavorable. Keeping speed in mind, application quality should also not be overlooked. To deliver a good user experience balancing speed and quality is a must.
One easy way to speed up cycle time is by taking advantage of the automated test suite, refining the current test automation strategy, and adjusting the process already in place.
The impact of speeding up cycle times is that the testers can see the result of their input quickly. Instead of spending a lot of time in the planning process and then waiting for weeks to see how the feature works, they can regularly see changes, this makes them happy and keeps them engaged with the team.
Keeping testing speed and quality in mind testers and developers can implement a few tactics that speed up a test runtime. This will contribute to faster release cycles, which is good for both technical and business reasons.
Let’s discuss the ways to speed up your test cycle.
1. Being organized
Keeping your tests organized may get overlooked most of the time and it may be the last thing to come to mind while running an application through various test cases. But organizing your test cases will surely simplify the process for you. You can keep your test cases lean and reusable, and automate features at the unit level this will speed up your testing process in the future.
Following suitable test management methods, keeping clean automation reports, and maintaining accurate data, will make it easier for you as well as your teammates to run tests whenever they’re needed. This in turn saves a lot of time.
2. Perform testing in Parallel on real devices
Running each test one after the other in sequential order, and running two or more test cases in parallel is much faster to finish. Parallel testing is one of the easiest and most efficient ways to speed up the test cycle.
It allows you to divide your test suite and test several components of your application simultaneously. This enables you to run large test suites more quickly. With parallel testing, you can execute automated test scripts simultaneously across multiple device-browser-OS combinations instead of running the test script repeateadly on different configurations.
This speeds up the test execution by completing the entire test suite execution in much less time.
Hence opting for cloud-based platforms can be the best choice and LambdaTest is one such platform. It provides access to numerous platforms and browsers with their corresponding versions. This platform offers you to run automated parallel testing and use multiple browsers and versions in real environments.
Its real device cloud empowers you to choose from 3000+ real devices and browsers for running automated and manual tests with broader coverage for both websites and mobile apps testing. With LambdaTest you can access a cloud Selenium Grid for automated testing, which can be further accelerated with parallel testing.
LambdaTest supports integrations with popular CI/CD tools like Jira, and Jenkins to ensure streamlined automation testing. This would help in leveraging Parallel Testing for your CI/CD pipeline.
3. Select the right tools or framework to your advantage
Being a great tester you must know how to leverage the right tools that will help you. You must choose tools or frameworks that meet the needs of the application being tested and also support the programming languages the developers are comfortable with.
It’s very important for teams to understand their test goals and accordingly choose the right tool for automation testing. To leverage the most from testing, for example, running a cross-browser test or the previously mentioned parallel testing you can go with a automation testing platforms like LambdaTest that allows you to test on multiple devices and multiple browsers simply. You can do the same with different browser-device combinations. The more parallels a tester runs, the faster a test suite is completed in real user conditions.
4. Identify flakiness in tests
The benefit of automated suits and faster application test cycles can only be achieved if your tests are reliable and give timely alerts. Flaky tests can take away the benefits of automated test suites.
Seeing red all the time, dealing with inconsistent results, and rerunning failure require more and more labor and time to identify the actual cause. The tests grow and flakiness increases hence slowing the test cycle.
In order to avoid this, the first task is to get a green build by attacking the problem by isolating flaky tests from the build to fix them before rerunning the test again. Avoiding the need for rerunning the test and eliminating flaky tests would greatly improve test cycle speed.
5. Test through the user’s eyes
Application is of no value if it does not cater to its users. When tests get verified with the more technical aspects of an application, it must be designed from the user’s perspective. It is to note that the user’s convenience determines an application’s success.
6. Take the advantage of Unit Tests
The testing pyramid tells us to add more tests to the lower layer of the pyramid and less to the other layer. Unit Tests form the base of the testing pyramid as they run faster than tests at other layers.
Unit tests can handle actions like verifying the content of a downloaded file or emails with mocks and stubs. Adding as many tests as possible to the unit test level speeds up the process. Additionally, communicating and reviewing tests to review tests at the unit level with developers prevents code duplication at other levels.
7. Use Explicit Waits commands
When testers use Sleep commands to deal with the delay in server response it makes test scripts inefficient as it can lead to unsuccessful test execution. Because sleep commands pause the execution of test scripts for a specified amount of time. In order to handle this issue, testers must replace all sleep commands with wait commands. Because they enable QAs to handle certain elements which take more time to load.
An effective way to reduce test run time is using explicit waits rather than implicit waits. Because default wait time in Implicit waits between each step will only execute after the pre-defined amount of time has elapsed.
In explicit waits, on the other hand, the test will continue its execution as quickly as the preceding step is completed. Thus, an explicit wait command optimizes the overall test scripts and makes execution faster and more reliable.
8. Communication with teammates
Talking with your teammates is also an important key to effective and efficient testing. Communication between the developers, testers, and other stakeholders will help everyone to stay on the same page with documentation and reporting. As well they will be aware of the status of the application like what is new in the application, what needs to be tested, what has already been tested, and what needs to be fixed.
When everyone knows their task properly it will be easier to divide the task and workload evenly. Hence the task can be performed easily in a shorter period of time.
9. Know when to automate
Automating your tests will surely make testing exponentially more manageable and faster, but automating the wrong test cases can just slow down your progress. The automated testing approach is more for repeated tests and is comparatively faster. In regression testing and unit testing automation works well. On the other hand, manual testing is best suited in cases where detailed human interventions and intuitions are needed.
Hence, it is recommended to understand the best cases to automate before actually starting to run them. This will prevent you from wasting time. Which in turn speeds up your test cycle.
10. Identifying and submitting bugs early
Testing is a continuous process and must be performed from the early stages of development. As the code base remains smaller in the initial phase, finding and resolving critical bugs early will be easier to fix than in the later stages. By Tracking and submitting bugs early there will be no rush and risking mistakes at the last moment. This will take off the pressure on the developers and testers. Naturally, this will prove to be cost-effective and will help them to deliver better applications without wasting their time fixing issues in the later stage.
11. Write Atomic Tests
Another important best way to create a better and faster automation experience is to run atomic tests. Scripting atomic tests help in faster and easier execution as they focus on just one piece of application functionality rather than assessing multiple pieces of functionality and take a longer time.
Running individually but in parallel, atomic tests will execute in far less time than one longer test.
12. Cross-browser Testing
The tester’s majority of testing time is spent determining which devices they need to rely on. In the end, they either test on all devices or none at all. This takes a significant amount of time to perform cross-browser testing. As a result, you must follow a proper cross-browser testing strategy earlier on to ensure the devices and browsers to run the test on. This will help in saving you a lot of time without losing the quality of cross-browser compatibility tests.
To perform cross-browser testing there are a number of platforms available online and LambdaTest is one of them which you can use for your cross-browser compatibility testing. It allows you to run web application and web testing across 3000+ browsers, browser versions, and OS combinations.
Conclusion
The above-mentioned ways of speeding up your testing cycle can help your testing teams to accelerate their task, get faster results and drive fully-functioning applications to the market very shortly. These guidelines will help you to meet the expected results better than ever before.
