WHAT IS TEST AUTOMATION
What Does “Test” Mean?
You may read about QA, Tester, Test Engineer and so on.
Those persons may test software or hardware depending on how the product looks or feels like.
But it’s not necessarily a product you must interact with —
perhaps asking a question may be a part of testing in order to verify your thoughts or requirements —
that the product may have implemented or not.
In some cases it will be implemented in further development — it depends on the situation.
Testing can be subjective — every tester might think, feel, and understand differently as a human being.
You may have heard or read about Test Automation Engineer, or automated testing, and so on.
You can find many different names for different testing roles.
As I tried to explain briefly — I mean very briefly —
testing is a huge field in IT, and many books have been written about it.
So I recommend reading some of them to at least understand:
- Who is a tester?
- What does a tester do?
- How can testing be done?
Google can help you start.
(And maybe in some future blog post I’ll share books or articles I’ve read.)
Knowing the Answer Before Asking the Question
As I said in the beginning of this blog, asking a question to verify a requirement can be a part of testing.
In this case, as a tester, you don’t know the answer before you ask the question.
But as a Test Automation Engineer, you know the answer before you ask the question.
Sounds weird, right?
Because you want to get the answer you already know — you know which question to ask.
The difference is: as a Test Automation Engineer, you’re questioning a product, not a human being.
A product that doesn’t talk the language we use — it only understands programming languages.
Since you know the answers, it’s not a question anymore — it’s checking.
When you already know the answer, why ask a product that can’t think like a human?
You can save time and act instead — by checking the answers.
Automating the answers by checking them is what we call Test Automation.
But it’s not as simple as it sounds.
First, you have to choose which answers you want to get.
Then ask yourself:
- Do those answers exist in the product?
- If not, should they exist?
As you see, you need to know the product well before you can check anything.
That means the product must be ready for checking,
and it must already contain the answers you’ll expect later in your checks or automated tests.
Why is it called Test Automation?
Because you will be checking many answers,
and those answers will expand over time.
You want to make sure that you still get the same answer to your first question,
even when there are 1,000 other answers added later.
Since this blog is about Test Automation — not technical testing —
I’ll explain how to get started with automation in the next blog.
Of course, these are just my personal thoughts,
and they may not be the same as yours — or how you see Test Automation.