The hidden costs of inefficient automated tests

Teams adopt test automation to reduce the time and cost of manual testing, while increasing confidence in the quality of an application. However, an inefficient test suite can do just the opposite: it can drive testing costs up while creating uncertainty that the application has been properly tested.

You may have inefficiency in your test suite if you experience one or more of the following issues:

• You often need to update multiple tests because your system changes and your tests are fragile.
• You have many tests that were created via “copy and paste” techniques, and so it is unclear what functionality is being verified in each test.
• You have to invest a lot of effort into maintaining your tests because they are difficult to understand.

The Qualicen Quality Plug-In for Ranorex Studio

You know that the quality of your tests is important. In any situation where quality matters, you can benefit from tools that help analyze and maintain quality. One such tool is the Qualicen Quality Plug-in for Ranorex Studio, which works like a static code analysis for your Ranorex tests. The Qualicen plug-in integrates into Ranorex Studio and identifies common inefficient practices in test automation, such as the following:

• Long modules: Modules are hard to read, understand and maintain when they are too long. It is best practice to break them up into smaller modules, each with a meaningful name.
• Unused modules: Unused modules make maintenance even harder. When the application under test changes, it can be difficult to identify which modules need to be updated.
• Poor UI element identification: Identifying UI elements by labels or position is fragile and makes your tests break easily.
• Cloned recording modules: Duplicate tests increase the maintenance effort and make tests harder to read.

The Qualicen plug-in has several additional built-in checks that help you create clear, readable, stable and maintainable tests in Ranorex.

Want to learn more?

To learn more about the Qualicen plug-in for Ranorex, visit the product website.

Aren’t using Ranorex Studio yet? Download the free trial to see how easy it can be to create your own test automation scenarios.