JazzTeam’s Test Automation Best Practices

Test automation is a critical and integral part of Continuous Integration and allows you to stabilize your product while saving time and spending on quality testing. It is the most efficient way to detect bottlenecks on any software lifecycle stage and carry out regression testing.

We have been creating automated tests since 2011. Since then, we have successfully completed over 50 test automation projects, acquired vast experience in the sphere, and developed an integrated approach to automation testing.

Our company applies CI/CD (Continuous Integration/ Сontinuous Deployment) for all the projects. We integrate our automated tests to the CI/CD processes from the very start and benefit immediately, thus justifying your investment in automated testing. We provide a high level of testing arrangement through professional management and ensure the best practices of automated tests and product quality control for your project. We apply all available automation related tools and efficient approaches in our work, such as Test Driven Development, which is often used in the Agile projects. Our test automation engineers are aficionados of Data Driven Testing. We have accumulated large experience during the use of this approach, which allows us to cover and stabilize the most crucial parts of a product efficiently and swiftly.

With us, you can be sure your project will be managed by experienced engineers with design skills. They are capable of creating required OOP models (to implement a PageObject pattern and create REST API tests, for instance) and scalable architecture during the automated test development. That way they strive to formalize their practices into reusable components. JazzTeam experts solve test automation challenges of any complexity: they create Unit tests of Java classes and frameworks, they implement integration tests of app architecture layers, test the complex asynchronous extensive SOA apps processes and web user interfaces.

We create open-ended clear-structured automated tests that are easy to develop and maintain, support them with comprehensive documentation, and establish a test-management process. We set up CI/CD so that our customers can manage the automated test launch independently.

In our work we adhere to the following automated testing stages.

*In case when we are collaborating in terms of product development, the fulfillment of test automation is included in the provided service.

It is more profitable for you to order a test automation service from us than delegate this task to your dev team. Test automation is a complicated process, which requires vast time and money spending if engaged specialists don’t have enough experience and competence. Moreover, you cannot be sure to get a successful result if the task is unfamiliar to your team. Outsourcing test automation to a third party also has important advantages: objective and unbiased quality estimation of your product.

With us, you get not only high-quality automated tests but also a comprehensive solution of issues, related to test and release management and CI/CD integration.

The culture of our company develops and builds up a proactive attitude in every employee. While working on projects, we propose new ideas and solutions that bring additional value to the clients as well as consult on challenging issues. Such cooperation results in a competently created test automation process as well as required information support. Our experts are ready to mentor your team to help you apply the recommended practices.

Solid management is an important part of our test automation service. We adhere to the project management culture elaborated by us and apply standardized and formalized processes. Our managers control the project status, coordinate team actions, increase productivity via constant facilitation, take responsibility for all communications, and harmoniously merge into the ecosystem of your company. Learn more about our vision of a professional manager role in your project.

At JazzTeam, we apply flexible approaches for all our services: we rely on the Agile philosophy, build processes according to the Scrum methodology, and use eXtreme Programming practices and techniques in our everyday work. That way we ensure transparency of interaction and the possibility for the customer to actively get into the product development process. Working with us, you can choose the degree of project involvement: starting from getting detailed project statuses from our managers to taking part in daily team stand-ups and retrospectives at the end of an iteration.

Our professional work approach allows us to deliver high-quality software consistently, achieve the goals on time, and maintain team productivity at the high level throughout the project.

Read our cases of the projects we implemented. Each of them will help you understand the way test automation improves the product and solves various quality-related challenges.

In test automation, we focus on an efficient working bundle of engineering mind when creating automated tests, expert level of CI/CD, and professional test management. This approach allows us to comprehensively solve complex tasks and share our own culture of applying the best development and testing practices.

Let’s explain, why each element of the bundle is important, and how the applied approaches and methods benefit our clients.

We always integrate the created automated tests in the CI/CD processes. This approach ensures smooth product operation and provides a clear stability control system for different versions of the product. CI/CD has a positive effect on the quality and stability of the product code. The implemented practice of continuous Unit test creation by developers also influences the project architecture quality. All this allows us to save money on software development and testing.

We integrate CI/CD iteratively and seamlessly while efficiently overcoming learned helplessness and resistance of teams. We implement a full cycle of Continuous Integration through Jenkins/Hudson (and other CI/CD tools), automate the project build with Maven. If required, we apply Docker and other container technologies to automated deployment.

Unit testing is a generally accepted standard in a modern development that provides a full-fledged Continuous Integration implementation. A combination of Unit, integration, and UI testing allows us to build stable, maintainable, and scalable products for our clients. We apply frameworks such as JUnit/TestNG and other tools, including Mockito and EasyMock, for Unit testing. We also have experience in various JUnit/TestNG customizations, including the development of our own JUnit runners.

Data Driven Testing is a method of building an automated test architecture that is based on comparing a set of input parameters with a reference result or state. DDT allows for a test written only once to be reused for various input data. An important advantage of a well-designed DDT is the possibility to enter input values and a reference result in a convenient form for all project roles: engineers, manual QA, and even Product Owners. That way transmitting a task of increasing the data array to a manual QA, for example, can dramatically reduce the cost of product testing. We have been applying DDT on a professional level since the foundation of our company, that is why we have gained huge experience and knowledge working with it (read our DDT article and see for yourself).

We apply standardized processes and think over the entire infrastructure for creating and implementing automated tests when we provide a service of test automation. JazzTeam managers dive deeply into the life cycle of your product and choose the optimal strategy for carrying out tests, manage the process of creating automated tests, and provide all the necessary reports containing the number and quality of covered test cases and fixed bugs on the regular basis. We continue to monitor the test runs on the Jenkins server and analyze the received result at the test case support stage while working closely with the customer’s managers and development team. That manner we provide a comprehensive solution to the challenges related to test management.

We apply a large technology stack to perform test automation and can easily find the right tools for you. We use Mock objects to test isolated methods. We also use Selenium/WebDriver, Concordium, Karma, Jasmine to test web interfaces, and we carry out load testing using JMeter. Check out the tools and technologies we utilize.

Our company applies test automation on all the performed and underway projects, as it is our culture and technology values. Let’s examine those situations, where test automation is strongly required:

Any of the mentioned factors should make you think about the need to implement test automation.

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