If you are a practitioner of automated testing, Its quiet common to frequently script and run a high number of automated tests for the businesses we work with.
So when you have a high volume of test results to analyse, it can be challenging to analyse and understand insights about the product. Even exporting results in Excel will not help as such large amounts of data makes it difficult to identify trends.
But thanks to innovative automation solutions, we now have visual test analytics built into the tools, which allow us to draw conclusions quickly and easily from the test results.
Many automation tools provide visual test analytics such as Micro Focus UFT, TestProject.io and more. These let you explore the data in several dimensions, making it simple for anyone on the team to understand, including developers, testers, business analysts, management and other stakeholders.
Why Use Visual Test Analytics?
Visual test analytics helps you to gain greater insights into a product being developed and facilitate problem-solving. Test results are easier to understand with the help of a graph compared to a long set of data.
The benefits of relying on visual test analytics include:
- Early detection of trends to evaluate the quality of the product
- Faster and easy analysis and interpretation of results that involve large volumes of data
- Remove the need for any specific knowledge or training
Who Can Take Advantage?
Anyone on the team can work with test results. Some examples of this include:
1. A business analyst (BA) may quickly pull out the results of the test analytics to understand how a particular module has been performing after the product has been delivered to the customer. If a trend that alerts a defect is noticed, the BA can inform the development team to rectify the issue and make course corrections for future releases.
2.The automation tester or test automation developer can utilise visual analytics for most of their daily responsibilities. The more they make use of the visual results the better they are at their jobs. For instance, when developers launch cross-browser tests and observe that their tests are failing on a specific set of browsers, then the application developers can be informed to take remedial steps.
3.The management team can leverage visual reports and analyse the metrics that mattes the most. The visual tools can export reports to PDF/Word documents that can be shared easily. With visual reports, results can be simplified, summarised and easier to interpret by non-technical participants.
What to Expect in Visual Test Analytics Reports?
Visual test reports in modern systems allow real-time visibility into testing progress.
Instead of relying on Excel, you can utilise next-gen real-time analytics and dashboards and stop questioning or speculating the progress of the automated testing.
In real-time, you can view the progress of the tests individually or in groups in addition to browser and device coverage. Additionally, you can also view the test velocity in real-time, highlighting all successful and failed test executions for easy debugging.
Furthermore, these tools allow the exporting of test results in different categories of simplified PDF reports. This makes sharing and distribution more efficient.
Each of these different types of reports will help you analyse various aspects of data. Ultimately, this helps you to answer the many additional questions you would want to investigate when creating your automated tests.
Some examples of this include:
- Summarised reports in different perspectives – Not only do the automation tools provide detailed insights into each test but they can also be grouped together in different perspectives to pinpoint a specific trend.
For instance, a multi-device or multi-platform chart, at a glance, can help you understand how your test has been faring across several devices.
This can be particularly useful when viewing platforms you might want to test in-depth or isolate a platform-specific bug. The graphs can be customised to offer insights into passed and failed tests on different devices.
Understanding how your tests perform on various devices is a critical step towards understanding the overall quality of your product from your clients’ perspective. The chart below gives you an idea of how a visual representation might look like when certain devices cause problems.
- Distribution charts will help you understand the pass and fail rates across groups of tests. For instance, pinpoint a platform with certain issues. Suppose you notice significant failures on an agent run on Windows compared to Mac, you can then investigate specific reasons for the occurrence. Below is a demonstration of a distribution chart.
- Velocity charts can help you analyse the number of tests that have been running and the ratio of failed to passed. The chart below demonstrates how the graph might look using the TestProject tool.
If the test report allows you to perform time-of-day distribution, you can customise the chart with the number of days and times too. For instance, the customisation could permit you to filter and analyse the last 30 days or the last 20 executions by selecting the range.
More interactive graphs are available that are even more effective in analysing trends. These charts, when selected, may let you drill down to the exact test that failed. Such deep dive enables you to perform valuable tasks like step failure analysis.
If you begin using visual test analytics reports, a greater analysis of your test results will help the whole team to better understand the application being developed and deliver a bug-free product.
Conclusion
Thanks to automation tools that have evolved to include all the most innovative features, automation is a lot easier and more intuitive than before. However, the best tests in the world mean nothing if the report cannot be comprehended. The purpose of visual analytics in test automation is to allow all those involved in the application development to recognise the quality of the product being developed in real-time.
The visual analytics is not just restricted to debugging alone but also to assist management teams and directors to understand the product from a business standpoint.
To learn more about how to introduce automation into your testing processes, click here to go to testhouse.net.
Check out all the software testing webinars and eBooks here on EuroSTARHuddle.com
