What is Automated Regression Testing? | Importance, Required Tools and Best practices

Regression testing is done when some changes occur in the software. These changes may be due to some new features or some bug fixes. Even after adding this new feature or fixing a bug in one part, developers may not know the impact on other parts of the affected system, which may break existing work. After code changes, testers must re-evaluate the performance of all products to prevent disruptions or new infections. Otherwise, these errors will go unnoticed and still cause defects. In this article, we will learn about automated regression testing, its needs, and required tools.

We will also understand how to automate regression testing and its best practices.

What is Automated Regression Testing?

Automated regression testing is a software testing process that ensures that applications continue to work properly after being updated with new code, improvements, or features. When performing automatic regression analysis, a preliminary study is usually carried out on software testing models, testing strategies, and changes to the product and its functionality. Automated regression testing involves several tasks, including system checks, performance testing, and fault analysis checking, to ensure that software compiles correctly after an update.

Importance of Automated Regression Testing

In this section, let’s understand why automatic regression testing is needed.

1. Repeatability: In strict agile projects, regression tests need to be done in a highly repeatable way. If done manually, the testing process may take a lot of time as the test data increases. However, automated tests can help cover these costs and will be more efficient, even if they have to be done every day.
2. No Human Intervention Required: When the meeting is automated, no human intervention is required at runtime. You can schedule them or execute them as needed and return the results when finished.
3. Shorter Turnaround Time: As the number of test cases increases, manual measurement cannot keep up with automatic measurement. Automated tests can be faster and approve new versions in a matter of hours while manual tests may take days to complete.
4. Efficacy: People often make mistakes when repeating old tasks but automated testing is free from errors.
5. Improve Testing Coverage: As your tests can be reused through automated test iterations, testers can create more efficient tests. With development testing, your AppDev team is more likely to find suspicious bugs caused by code updates. In addition to technical testing, your testers are given plenty of time for manual searches.
6. Rapid Application Development: Agile software development is essential for many organizations, but rapid development means little if the application is riddled with bugs. For this method to work, you need a combination of rapid deployment and good execution. Automated regression testing run through test suits as soon as new feature released.

Tools For Automated Regression Testing

1. Selenium: It is an ,open-source project that provides many tools and libraries to support browser automation. PHP, Java, Ruby, C++, JS etc. It supports many languages ​​such as Maven, Ant etc. It can be easily integrated with popular frameworks.
2. Appium: It is an Node.js-basedis ,a open-source tool for running automation scripts to test native, mobile web and hybrid applications on Android or iOS using web drivers. Appium is available in two versions. The first is a Node.js based tool while the second is a desktop tool. But both are used for regression test automation.
3. REST Assured: It is a framework for REST service authentication in Java and using Java libraries. In Rest Assured, Java libraries act as headless agents for secure web services and can verify HTTP responses from the server. This tool helps improve the quality and safety of testing.
4. TestNG: It is inspired by JUnit and NUnit. TestNG is designed to cover many test suites which can be unit, functional, integrated and end-to-end, with easy-to-use features.
5. Jenkins: It is an open source automation server. It helps automate parts of software development related to building, testing, and deployment. Jenkins makes integration and continuous deployment easy.
6. BrowserStack: BrowserStack is a cloud-based web and mobile web benchmarking tool that compares websites and mobile applications across expected browsers, functions and features, versus actual mobile usage.
7. Maven: It is a widely used automation tool for Java projects. It can also handle scripts written in C#, Ruby, Scala and other languages.

How to Automate Regression Testing?

1. Understand the Needs: This is the most important step, you must understand what kind of evaluation that is required for our products, whether it is front end, back end or both.

2. Select the Testing Tool: After defining the requirements, you can choose the most suitable tool to achieve the same. Choosing the right regression testing tool is an important step in automating regression testing. Popular testing software such as Selenium, JUnit and TestNG have made a huge impact in this field. This tool not only helps with testing but also integrates well into CI/CD pipelines.

3. Check the Conditions under which it should work: The next step is to find the list of conditions under which it should work as P0 or P1. Once you’re done, you can continue adding P2 and the rest of the site. Regression test selection requires a significance test based on certain criteria such as:

• Functionality: Choose test cases that cover the basic functionality of the software.
• Frequency: Select tests that are performed frequently.
• Data Sensitivity: Choose tests where certain data is important.

4. Automated Test Cases: The next step is to start automating the test case using the design. Follow the steps:

• Test Scripts Writing: Test writing is the first step in creating test resumes. You can easily capture graphics and complex text using Selenium’s WebDriver.
• Verification: The last step of the automated test data is verification. Check if the test was successful according to your expectations. The test failure issue should be analyzed to see if it is a bug or an issue with the test itself.
• Executing Regression Tests: After writing the tests, the next step is to execute them. Automation tools like Selenium make regression testing easy. Before testing, make sure your testing environment is set up correctly.

5. Completing Automation Testing: Once the automation is finished, we need to run them locally to see if there are any errors. Incorrect errors can cause unnecessary alarms. Therefore, they should be treated early in the development process. Repeatable testing can be time-consuming, but multiple repeatable tests and parallel testing can speed up the process.

• Parallel Testing: One way to optimize regression testing is to test in parallel. This allows you to run multiple tests simultaneously and saves a lot of time. Parallel testing works best when you want to run repeated tests in different settings and environments.
• Code Changes and Retests: There is no need to perform entire code tests when minor changes occur. Use test case values ​​to select tests that affect only the areas affected by the code change.

6. Prepare the Regression Package: Once the cases become sufficiently automated and stable, you should start adding them to the regression package. You can sort your suits into categories like Smoke, Regression and more.

7. Reporting: Once a case is automated and added to the regression or smoking suite, you need to engage in a reporting process that will help report the results once completed. Analyzing test results is important for determining application quality, identifying areas for improvement, and planning future tests.

• Test Comprehension: Your team needs to be able to read and analyze the test text. Interpret the results provided by the regression analysis tool. Today’s tools often provide detailed information that includes the number of passes, passes, and failed tests. Detailed examination of failed files will provide insight into whether bug fixes are effective or new bugs appear with new updates.
• Using analytical tools: Analytical capabilities provided by tools such as TestRail and QMetry allow teams to create custom dashboards. Dashboards can display key performance indicators such as test completion time, failure rate, and more. The ability to visualize this information is beneficial to both the development team and stakeholders.

8. Run the testing suite with a single CI/CD tool: After completing the above steps in one go, you can select the appropriate CI/CD tool and You can schedule these packages to run daily or whenever a new version is introduced to the QA environment.

Why use Automated Regression Testing?

• Creating Multiple Tests: Automated testing tools can create multiple tests for you once you find the root cause of a problem. These tests can be used as a useful tool to find recovery bugs and bugs in the code.
• Errors Found Easily: Automated regression testing must be done regularly so that these errors can be easily found and resolved.
• Running on Multiple Devices: Automated tools allow you to do this quickly and efficiently. It will give you results even if the test is run on multiple devices at the same time.
• Identifying Problems: Automated tools also provide comprehensive diagnostic information to help you identify potential problems and resolve them as quickly as possible.

Difference between Regression Testing and Retesting

Basis	Regression Testing	Retesting
Meaning/Uses	Regression testing is used to ensure that software updates do not adversely affect the software.	Retesting is used to ensure that previously failed tests are corrected.
Defect verification	Defect verification are not performed instead it ensure that modifications do not cause any problem in software	Defect verification are performed to check the failed test cases.
Type of test cases	Only tests cases that pass the first phase of testing will be subject to regression testing.	Only tests that fails the first phase testing will be subject to retesting.
Functioning	Regression testing controls the possibility of some undesirable errors.	Original problem can be resolved with retesting
Mode of completion	It is completed in manual or automatic mode	It is completed manual mode

What are the Best Practices for Automated Regression Testing?

Let’s take a look at some of the best practices you should follow to make our tests stronger and help us in the long run.

• Updating Backtest: Backtest needs to be updated regularly to ensure that test units are updated with the latest changes released to the application.
• Test Classification: It is necessary to reclassify the test according to the behavior of the application. Because later when the test fails you will know which category the test is in. You will be able to quickly identify areas of this application and provide the necessary information to the development team.
• Re-run performance tests: In the agile world, it is important to re-run even successful tests to ensure that the application continues to work well.
• Analyzing Tips: Even if recovery analysis is done every day, you need to take some time and analyze the data correctly. This way any error will not miss out.

Conclusion

Automated regression testing is a process to ensure that new software updates do not impact the functionality of existing software applications. In addition to saving time, automatic test recovery also provides a detailed and in-depth description of failed tests that need to be fixed.