Your team has just finished developing a mobile app and is ready to take it to market. You’re confident that your product reaches the highest usability, functionality, security, and performance standards.
There’s no need for testing, right? Not quite. Software testing is a necessary step to ensure the quality and security of your products.
There are two kinds of testing: manual and automated. Manual testing involves a team running tests to catch any errors, while automated testing uses algorithms.
With the increase in the scale and scope of testing in DevOps, the need for automated testing is greater than ever.
What are the types of automated testing?
Software testing can be placed into two major categories: Black Box and White Box Testing. The two boil down to differences in a test environment. Depending on what test data you’d like to execute, you’ll use a different strategy.
The key difference to remember is that Black Box Testing carries out the process without knowledge of the program’s internal structure. By contrast, in White Box Testing, the internal structure is known to the tester.
Black Box Testing
As we’ve established, Black Box Testing is done without the knowledge of the internal structure of the application. This tests the program from the point of view of the user.
It aims to discover how the system responds to expected and unexpected user actions, its response time, reliability, and usability issues.
In terms of automation, it’s more challenging to automate Black Box tests. However, it’s still possible to automate this process.
You must implement a record and learn approach. You need to record an action and create a test that you can reuse regularly.
Think of Black Box Testing as a way to step out of your developer’s shoes and into the user’s. It allows you and your automated tests to test the user experience by using a wide range of inputs.
White Box Testing
White Box Testing is the easiest way to use Automation testing services. The software knows the program’s internal structure and works to verify the internal functioning of the system.
Testing is based on coverage of conditions, paths, code statements, and branches. White Box Testing is most useful for unit and integration testing.
This is because the main objective of White Box Testing is to verify the quality of the code. To write tests for this type of testing, you need to understand the program well to ensure complete coverage of the program logic.
With White Box Testing, you’re not experiencing the software as the user but evaluating it based solely on the way it works as a piece of computing code.
In this test, you put yourself inside the software and look at how the code is interacting within and between lines.
What are examples of automated testing?
If you were unfamiliar with the broad categories of White and Black Box Testing, you might be more accustomed to hearing about specific examples of software testing.
Good app testing frameworks incorporate most (if not all) of these examples. Whether you’re developing a mobile or web application, each of these has a place in your methodology.
Unit Testing
If the individual parts of your code won’t work, you have no chance of them working within your final product. It doesn’t matter if you’re using Python or Java; you need to find out if the individual parts of your code work.
Unit testing takes a deep dive into the smallest piece of code that can be isolated in a system. If you’re looking at the units in most programming languages, it’s a function, method, property, or subroutine.
The unit can be a line of code, a method, or a class. However, the smaller the amount of code under testing, the more granular the view you’ll receive of your product.
With automation, it’s easy to run small amounts of code in large volumes, as it requires no human input.
To carry out Unit Tests, the tester requires an awareness of the program’s internal structure, making it a type of White Box Test.
The best part of Unit Testing is that it can be executed throughout the software development process. This provides you with a continuous delivery of feedback that will expedite the development process, sending products to market sooner.
