What is an Automated Test Suite & How to Create it?

Test automation helps to accelerate test execution and delivery, in turn, it helps to go early to the market. Like manual testing, automation testing also has different phases. Test strategy, test planning, test creation, and execution are a few stages of the automation test cycle. 

Automation tests follow a similar process to manual testing, but there will not be human intervention during the execution phase. Once the manual test case is automated, it will be marked as an automated test case. Then you can group such automated test cases to create the automated test suite, which helps to execute the test cases automatically based on feature, environment, etc.

What is an Automation Test Suite?

An automation test suite or automated test suite is a collection of automated test cases that are grouped by their functionality, environment, or based on some characteristics. Automated test suite helps in CI/CD integration. For example, If a developer is fixing a login-related feature, you may not want to trigger the whole regression, rather you may just be required to trigger the login test suite. This helps to save time and get instant and faster feedback.

Why Automated Testing Suite?

An automated test suite helps to execute the test as many times as required, without any manual intervention and additional effort. Manual test cases will have a dependency on the manual testing team and their availability. This can delay feature testing, if there is a bug again the developer needs to fix it and hand it over to the manual testing team and this can happen over and over. 

The automation test suite, on the other hand, helps to execute the test cases in the absence of the testing team and reports are instant. The automated test suite also helps to execute only the required collection of test cases or test cases that are in scope for the current feature. This way, an automated test suite provides a lot of benefits over a manual test suite.

Automated Test Suite Features

Most of the organizations are switching towards test automation. Automated test suite execution has a lot of benefits. Below are some of the key benefits of an automated test suite.

• Automated test suite helps to reduce the execution time
• Automated test suites can be configured to execute on required browsers, operating systems, etc.
• It doesn’t require any human resources to execute the test suite
• Test suite execution can be repetitive without any additional effort
• Easy to manage test cases
• Reports are instant and all necessary evidence is part of it
• Automated test suite helps to integrate the application testing as part of the CI/CD pipeline
• Helps to go early to the market

How to create an Automated Test Suite?

An automated test suite helps to execute the automated test cases based on requirements. One of the unique features of an automated test suite is that you can run the tests as many times as possible on different environments, browsers, operating systems, etc. without modifying the actual test case. 

Let’s understand how to create the automated test suite using Testsigma.

Step 1. Create an automated test case

As mentioned earlier, the test suite is a collection of test cases. You need to create the test cases first to create a test suite. Compared to code-based tools, it’s easy to create a test case in Testsigma. Below are the steps to create the test case in Testsigma.

• Login to Testsigma
• Click on ➕ Symbol from the left navigation panel
• Click on Test Cases
• Now, You can enter the test case name.
• Start recording the test cases

Step 2: Create an automated test suite

In Step 1, you have created the test cases. Once you have a satisfactory number of test cases then you can create the Test suite. Testsigma is a no-code automation platform, to create a test suite you do not need to worry about any scripting. Let’s understand test suite creation in Testsigma

• Click on ➕ symbol from left navigation
• Choose the Test Cases and then Click on Test Suites
• Click on Create, the test suite creation window pops up
• Enter the Test suite name and other details
• Click on Add Test Case details. The Test Case filter window pops up
• Select the required Test Cases and Click on Save 
• Click on Create, Test Suite is now created

Step 3: Create a Test plan

Once you create the test suite, you need to execute the test suite. For execution, you need to create the Test Plan. Test Plan contains execution details such as browser name, platform, execution mode, etc. Let’s understand how to create a Test Plan in Testsigma

• Click on  ➕ symbol from the left nav
• Choose the Test Cases and then the Test Plans option
• Click on Create TestPlan
• Enter the Test plan name and Click on Next
• Next, you will be asked to add the Test suite
• Add all the required Test suite names 
• You can also add the machine configuration in the same Window
• Click on Next to add the Test plan settings

Test plan settings contain notification details, page time-out details, screen capture options, etc. You can configure them or you can leave the default configurations.

Once you create the Test Plan you can run the Test Plan as many times as possible. You can even create a Test plan with different settings.

How to Maintain an Automated Test Suite?

Maintaining a test suite may be challenging if you do not follow best practices and standards. Irrespective of the tool you choose, Test suite maintenance should be taken care of by the tester. Below are some of the key pointers on maintaining the test suite.

Make a plan

It is important to make a test plan. Once your test plan is approved and ready to execute, have a discussion with the developer and other stakeholders. Ensure that all impacts are communicated effectively. This can help in frequent or unnecessary changing of components and helps to reduce maintenance.

Keep your test suite clean and updated

As you begin to automate, over a period of time, the test cases may become invalid, or sometimes the test steps may change. If you leave the test cases and test suite unattended for a long tim, then you may not get reliable results. Always update the test cases as early as possible.

Use helper methods and common libraries as much as you can

Common libraries are used as generalization or parameterization of the methods. This approach helps to reduce the maintenance. As many test scripts invoke the same method to perform an action, you do not have to modify all the test scripts, you just need to modify only common methods or helper methods. This helps in increasing the reusability and maintenance.

Use centralized tool

Automation tools like Testsigma come with an in-built Test suite creation option, this helps to reduce the effort of maintenance as you can add, remove, view, and filter all test suites in one place. Adapting intelligent tools makes test suite maintenance more easier.

How Does Automated Test Suite Work?

Automated Test Suite helps to reduce the time to market to a large extent. To understand in detail, let’s analyze how the automated test suite works.

• The automated test suite is a logical grouping of automated test cases
• First, you need to create the all required test cases in the scope
• Once you have a satisfactory number of test cases, you can create the test suite.
• Later, if you create new test cases that belong to the existing test suite then you can add them to the existing test suite.
• The test suite helps to run only required scenarios during the release.
• The test suite can be configured to run on specific browsers, operating systems, and required resolutions during the execution phase.
• Finally, you can execute the automated test suite as many times as possible without any manual resource requirement and additional effort

Modern Strategies to Scale Automated Testing Suites

The scope of test automation has changed in recent years. As every organization is focusing on a rapid delivery process, the time window you get for test automation and execution is comparatively small. Modern application development requires modern test automation processes and tools. Below are a few strategies to scale automated testing suites.

Use cloud testing to get rid of the complexity involved in the virtual environment or infrastructure.

To meet the success criteria for test automation there may be many infrastructure requirements needed. For example, you may be required to execute on Windows, Linux, or macOS. Additionally, each machine will have different browsers. Maintaining these infrastructures is not an easy job. Furthermore, if you are expecting a shorter execution duration and faster report, then you need to execute the tests on multiple machines in parallel. All this infrastructure requires complex setup and it also requires considerable time and effort. 

Cloud-based testing tools like Testsigma provide all these cloud-based features; you need not worry about any infrastructure and maintenance. You can focus only on the core goal which is automation testing.

Use AI and ML for enhanced features

Artificial Intelligence (AI) helps to reduce maintenance efforts to a large extent. AI automation tools can help to intelligently select the locator. It can also help to detect the tests which are frequently failing for a long period. Using AI-based tools can help you reduce the maintenance effort.  Testsigma is one such tool that comes with AI integration built in.

Use Smart automation tools to integrate into the DevOps ecosystem

Integrating test automation into the DevOps ecosystem can help execute the test as part of the development pipeline. No need to worry about manual triggering and scheduled execution. However, to achieve this you need to have intelligent tools like Testsigma. Testsigma allocates the execution resources and infrastructure based on demand. It can automatically scale up and down based on incoming demand and ensures a stable execution result.

Best Tips to Increase Automated Test Suite Performance

Automating testing is popular because test results are free from human errors, and results are faster. If your automation execution is taking many hours then you need to think of the performance of the automation test suite. There are many reasons to slow down the test execution. Let’s discuss one by one.

Reduce the UI tests

User Interface based tests are always flaky compared to non-UI tests. Nowadays, all modern applications use the API-driven development technique. API helps validate data and logical use cases efficiently and more quickly. 

Compared to UI-based tests, API tests take 80% less time compared to UI testing. Additionally, API-based tests don’t have a dependency on browsers and locators. Reducing the UI tests can help to improve the performance of your test suite.

Parallelise your tets

A complex application can have thousands of test cases, if you execute sequentially one after the other it can take a day or two. Parallelization helps to speed up the execution speed by running multiple tests at a given point in time. In this way, you can achieve faster results. Parallelization requires good infrastructure, choosing a good automation tool like Testsigma can help you to allocate the required infrastructure on demand and produce a reliable result.

Automate only Critical Functionality

The first rule of automation is to automate frequent and critical tests. No need to automate every single functionality through UI. The end-to-end tests or UI-based tests are the top layer of testing, before that there are unit tests, component tests, integration tests, and API tests. You need to smartly choose eligible use cases for UI automation tests and API automation tests to keep your test suite stable.

Invest in Continuous Integration

Continuous integration tools like Jenkins, CircleCI, and AzureDevOps help execute the tests as part of the development lifecycle automatically. This eliminates the manual triggers and monitoring. Developers will be able to get the regression issues as part of their deployment. Importantly, regression issues caught during the early development phase can also help the organization save on cost.

Use a Cloud-Based Testing Solution

As mentioned earlier, maintaining the testing tools and their infrastructure for execution in-house is a complex task. A cloud-based testing solution like Testsigma manages all required infrastructure and dependencies, this way testers need not worry about the infrastructure and non-testing related dependencies. Testers can only focus on automating the use cases. This helps to increase the test automation coverage and helps to manage the test suites efficiently.

Conclusion

Testsuite is a logical grouping of test cases. An automated test suite helps to execute the tests by tuning the configuration based on the requirement, it may be browser, platform, screen resolution, etc. 

Automated test suite requires considerable effort. Testsigma helps to manage the automated test suite easily by providing a rich UI. Irrespective of the tool you choose for test automation, timely maintenance is required to keep them up to date and to get meaningful results. However, if your testing tool has AI features it can reduce maintenance effort. 

Testsigma is popular tool which comes with in-built AI features. It also supports cloud execution and all related test management tasks without demanding any prior coding knowledge.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a test suite and a test plan?

A test plan describes the plan of how you want to execute your tests to reach your desired test coverage. A test suite is a collection of test cases that are logically connected.

What is a test suite in Agile?

A test suite is a bunch of test cases grouped to test a specific feature or purpose. A test suite also helps to execute the only required test cases on demand.

What is test suite vs test group?

Test suites are collections of test cases. Test groups can be just a tag or annotation that are applied to test methods. If you are using codeless automation tools like Testsigma you need not worry about managing these tags, as these are additional layers required for code-based testing tools.