What Is Regression Testing ?
What Do We Do In Regression Check?
Why Should Regression Testing Be Automated?
Getting Started with Test Automation
Automated regression testing in Agile : why, what, and how?
What can you do to make automated regression testing of the UI economically feasible?
Advantages of Regression Testing/Importance of Regression Testing:
Types & Techniques Of Regression Testing
How To Perform Regression Testing?
Who should perform Regression Testing:
Codeless automation testing of UI regression testing
How Much Regression Testing Is Required?
Regression Testing vs Functional Testing
Must-have features for automated regression testing tool
Dictionary meaning of the word "regression" is "the return to a former or less developed state." So, testing done with the aim of catching any regressions in an already tested functionality is called Regression Testing.
These regressions in the code can occur as a result of “bug fixes”, “new features added to the code” or “changing requirements”. The aim is to test all the code that could be impacted due to recent changes to ensure that no new bugs are introduced in an already tested functionality.
Although regression testing is confused with retesting many times, testers should remember that retesting and regression testing are different. Read in detail the differences of Regression Testing vs Retesting.
Are you looking for a tool to automate your regression test cases quickly and efficiently? Try Testsigma Today.
During the development phase - developers, testers and the stakeholders are worried more about the quality and correctness of new functionalities being worked on and not so much about the existing functionalities that were thoroughly tested and stable. But, more often than not, customers would still be using the existing functionalities much more than the new ones.
Developers, certainly, work on a new piece of code when working on new functionality but they are supposed to integrate it with the existing system and make any necessary changes in the existing code to make sure everything works well. During this time, it is highly likely that there could be some functionality in the existing code that might have been broken.
Hence, to make sure our end users get the same experience with the product as they were getting even before the new changes were pushed, regression testing needs to be executed. The regression test cases are choosen from already created functional test cases. One of the preferred way of tracking the creation and execution of these test cases is via a requirement traceability matrix.
Having continuous testing along with continuous integration for the automated test cases helps catch the bugs as soon as they are checked in. For this you need a test automation tool that integrates seamlessly with your CI/CD workflow.
Testsigma is one such tool that integrates with all your popular
CI/CD tools easily and
sets you up for continuous testing without any delays.
Book a demo with the experts to set up continuous Regression
testing.
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If you have a product that has a big regression test suite and is under active development, the best advice will be to automate the regression testing. Reason being, Regression Testing is the only kind of testing that needs to be repeated multiple times. It could be before every release when complete regression testing needs to be done or it could be after every change is done to the code, in the form of partial regression testing.
If your team has decided to start with test automation, you may still face some challenges as mentioned below:
To make sure that you get a return on investment you make into test automation you need to be aware of all the costs and then decide on the tool.
For eg. Investing in a tool that is easy to learn and does not require you to invest in infrastructure takes care of 2 areas for you. In addition, if it also makes test case creation simpler and easier, then it further reduces your investment cost and enables returns faster.
It allows to automate test cases while writing them in simple English, maintenance time is reduced by its AI/ML backend. Don’t worry about the infrastructure too - because it is completely cloud based and allows you to scale as your test cases grow.
Read more details on how to best automate regression testing effectively.
Read more about the challenges faced when Regression Testing is automated in an agile environment.
There are many tools that can be used for automation of regression test suites, few of them are listed below:
Uses simple English words to automate complex tests. An ideal tool to automate regression tests with suggestions of affected test cases.
This tool has an IDE called Katalon Studio that supports creation of test cases in JAVA and Groovy. It also has a Katalon Recorder.
This is a free tool for automation of workflows on websites
Has options for record and play as well as automation in a programming language.
When software development is done following agile methodology, new changes are pushed to the product every sprint and the expected output for a sprint is supposed to be a working deliverable. This means that the product should be tested and working in each and every sprint. Hence, after all the changes the product’s regression testing will be important at the end of every sprint.
If the regression testing at the end of every sprint was supposed to be done manually, it would eat up a lot of time and resources. Thus, automation of the regression test cases will play a very important part in saving the time and keeping the quality of a product consistent every sprint.
During automation, what needs to be automated needs to be decided with utmost care. The high priority test cases should be automated first starting with the automation of smoke and sanity test cases . And, also, if there are some areas of the product that are prone to changes and are not stable yet, the changes should be avoided.
The automation should be done using a tool that supports the automation of regression test cases.
Although most organizations now follow Agile because of the speed it renders to the complete development process, it does pose some regression testing affected challenges. Read the details about overcoming automated regression testing challenges in Agile here.
The right way to implement automation in a scrum is the in-sprint automation way. Implementing Insprint automation ensures that all tasks taken up in a sprint are automated in the same sprint. And also means the tasks are marked done according to the real definition of ‘definition of done’. Read about the challenges of insprint automation of regression testing here.
Read about Regression Testing in agile in detail.
A test automation framework is the set of rules, a predefined structure or guidelines that the automated test cases should follow. It is essential to have the structure in place for the best outcome of the test automation activity.
For the automated regression testing of the UI to be economically feasible, there are few points that should be considered before automation is put into place:
Experts have tried to come up with as many as 7 types of regression testing, but, on a broad level there are only 2 types of regression testing:
Complete Regression Testing:
This is when a complete regression test suite is executed. There could be multiple scenarios in which this is done:
Partial
Regression Testing:
This type of testing is done when only a portion of the regression test suite is executed. This can be done in multiple scenarios as listed below:
The kind of regression testing being pursued decides the way the test cases for regression test cases are selected for execution. Also, read more about the iteration and full regression testing in agile.
According to the type of project and its needs, different regression testing techniques can be employed as listed below:
Regression Testing can be manual or automated. If the number of test cases are small in number, it can be managed in less time manually too but if the number of regression test cases is large, automated regression testing is the ideal solution. The goal is to automate the regression test suite here.
All the test cases that were created for stable features are added to the regression test suite. When automated, all the test cases added to a regression test suite can be executed after every change as the testing will be automated and the time taken would be less too.
Testers who have not tested the feature before but are capable of executing the documented test cases. In such cases, the documentation should be up to the mark for newbies.
Testers who may not have executed the functional tests but have good knowledge about the features that need regression testing and can catch any major bugs, if any, introduced in them.
Testers who previously executed the functional tests for the features that need to be regression tested.
Testsigma allows you to automate test cases in simple English. Thus, it can be easily learnt and understood by non-technical members of the team too and can help jumpstart the automation of regression testing.
According to the type of project, the regression testing strategy can be decided. Example: If the project has a lot of development work going on in parallel, it will be a good idea to do a regression test once all the development work is completed.
If the project is such that there won’t be much time for regression testing at
the
end, regression testing will have to be executed after every change.
Here, selective regression testing will be needed, for which:
Framework will have to be defined for regression testing keeping below points in mind:
Best Practices for achieving best results are:
There are many applications that have an elaborate UI and need UI regression testing
to
be automated for best performance at all times. There are many automated testing
tools
that offer codeless automation of UI regression testing.
Some of the popular codeless automation testing tools are:
Selenium - record and play feature(Selenium IDE) can be used here to achieve codeless automation.
Sikuli - Python-based GUI automation tool, uses image recognition algorithm for element selection.
Katalon - very similar to Selenium, and its record and play feature can be used to achieve codeless automation.
Testsigma - An ideal automated regression testing tool that suggests relevant or affected test cases after a feature enhancement/bug fix. Testsigma lets you run regression tests right after the first check-ins, automatically, within a sprint.
SeeTest - A mobile automation tool that supports image-based as well as object-based recognition.
Test.ai - AI-powered bots that generate and execute test cases for testing UX of a mobile application.
Read details on Selenium Alternative for Automated Regression Testing here.
There could be 2 solutions:
There could be multiple approaches that could be adopted according to the need of the project and focusing on the optimum use of resources:
Have the regression test suite ready and decide how much time the complete execution will take.
Execute this regression test suite after all the changes are included and tested functionally and the next thing to do is release!
Of course, this is not a solution if quick deployments need to be done after a few fixes.
After a fix - a bug fix, a new feature integration or some change in the requirements, do an impact analysis of the change.
And according to the change and the time allotted for regression testing specific to that fix, execute the high priority test scenarios.
Read the details on how to decide when to start regression testing and when can it be considered complete.
While Regression Testing makes sure that there are no regressions in a product in related areas after a bug fix or a change, functional testing ensures the functionality of a product is according to the requirement specifications.
Regression Testing can include both functional testing and non-functional testing. Usually, it is the test cases created during functional testing that are included in the regression test suite once the functionality being tested becomes stable.
So, eventually functional testing becomes a subset of regression testing.
For more details on Functional and Regression Testing, read here .
Check our blog here for more details.
Whenever there are some changes introduced to some part of the code in the application under test in the form of bug fixes, enhancements, changes in requirements or features, there is a probability that some functionalities in the related areas of the code could be impacted.
Thus, the objective of Regression Testing is to make sure that the features and functionalities, that were tested to be stable before a change was made in code, continue to be stable even after the changes.
Regression Testing could be automated or could be performed manually depending on what processes are adopted by an organization for a product. If automated, the regression testing will necessarily be performing the same steps again and again.
But if done manually, the testers can use common sense to not repeat the same steps for all the test cases and try variations of it to uncover any new bugs.
Regression Testing can surely be automated. To proceed with automation make sure below 2 conditions are met:
Application under test is planned to be under active development for a long time
The number of regression test cases for the application under test are quite a lot such that it will take a long time to execute manually.
If the regression test cases are automated, much time won’t be lost even if all the test cases were executed. Thus, in such a scenario, how much regression testing does not need to be thought about.
But, if the test cases are not automated and time is a constraint - which usually is - the best way to go about it by following below steps:
Analyse the change and the impacted areas because of the change
For the impacted areas, execute high priority test cases
For the application as a whole, execute the critical test scenarios before any deployment or release
Regression Testing is absolutely essential to minimize the number of issues reported by customers post release. But there are times when the managers and stakeholders don’t realize the importance of regression testing and thus, don’t assign the time for it.
Being a tester, below are few things that can be done:
Discuss the importance of regression testing with your management and project stakeholdersWith every change testing - try to execute at least the critically important test cases for impacted areas.
Before every release - create a release checklist that includes execution of the most important workflows that a customer will go through for sure.
When possible, automate the regression test cases.
During the SDLC(Software Development Life Cycle), features are added to a product incrementally. Once a feature is tested thoroughly and is deemed stable, the test cases created for the testing of that feature are added to the regression test suite that will be executed when further changes will be made in the application in the future.
The test cases in the regression test suite can be easily automated as these are stable and the process of automating them is called regression testing automation.
When the code base for the product is huge and there are a lot of test cases that need to be executed for regression testing, automation saves precious time, efforts and resources that would be spent on doing the testing manually otherwise.
Automated Regression Testing reports any errors quickly in a matter of hours which might have taken days if the testing was done manually.
When done manually, humans could skip some test cases because of being new to the functionality or shortage of time or just by genuine mistake. Automation makes sure no minor functionality is missed.
To save on time, for regression testing, manual testers decide on test cases according to priority while when automated all the test cases that are automated can be run any number of times, often after every single change. Thus, the quality is in check at every moment.
Regression Testing involves execution of test cases corresponding to stable features and functionalities for an application. These test cases need to be executed multiple times, sometimes after a change in the code in the form of bug fix, enhancement, new feature, change in requirement.
Because these test cases need to change rarely and are executed multiple times during the SDLC(software development life cycle) for a project, they become a perfect candidate for automation
Agile development focuses on development in iterations, thus testing is also done in iterations. But, the end result for each of these iterations is a working deliverable. To be able to have a working deliverable at the end of every sprint, it is essential to do regression testing before the end of every sprint.
There is no right or wrong answer to this question.
There are organizations that don’t give so much importance to testing as compared to the speed of deployment and thus there are times when regression test automation is not a part of DevOps. But, even then there are organizations that have understood the part that regression testing plays in maintaining overall quality of a product and thus, have integrated it into their DevOps.
Now, as people are becoming more and more aware about maintaining quality of an application, experts are advising companies to include regression test automation under DevOps to enhance quality feedback loop.
