Calling on parents to solve the pain of traditional automated testing on the road to entrepreneurship

Testing is a topic that no developer wants to talk about, but it has to be mentioned. Testing is the last link in software development and is often not taken seriously. However, it is often at this point that all the hard work is wasted. After the software development phase is completed, it can be released to the public only after a strict testing phase. Testing is the last link for a software to enter the market.

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When entering the era of mobile Internet, the quality of apps emerging in various industries varies greatly. This is due to the overall domestic technical environment, which does not attach importance to testing. Some people will say that Google does not test its own apps, and we can also learn from Google. But Google's engineers are all top experts in their fields. What about the engineers you hire? Most companies will hire some junior developers for cost considerations, and the products they produce are also relatively rough, and they are not tested. The quality of the APP can be imagined.

When communicating with some entrepreneurs, they often have this idea: release first, and then modify after receiving user feedback. It is this idea that makes the hard-earned user base slowly dissipate, because when you have problems, users already have reasons to uninstall the app. Why not put a product that is close to the best in front of users?

In the process of communicating with some mobile entrepreneurs, I found that it is not that the product and R&D do not want to do testing, but that there is simply no energy and cost to do testing. Because the version iteration in the mobile Internet field is fast, the use of traditional testing methods will be a waste of time. From the current situation, it seems that only automated testers can go, but can the traditional automated testing model really meet the needs of mobile Internet entrepreneurs?

Traditional automated testing is not something you can test whenever you want

First of all, traditional testing requires the purchase of a large number of test equipment, which is a considerable cost for a startup team. The purchase cost of these equipment is even higher than the daily operating expenses of the entire team. If you consider doing automated testing, you have to hire a few people who understand it, which is an even bigger cost. So although automated testing looks good, few companies are willing to touch it. The reason is that the cost required in the early stage is unacceptable to most companies.

Secondly, traditional testing has high requirements for technology and time, and cannot adapt to the current situation of rapid version iteration in mobile Internet. After communicating with the test manager of a large company, I learned that traditional testing can also achieve automated testing, but the steps are more cumbersome.

To automate the Android test project, the following steps are required:

1. Understand product features.

2. Evaluate manual test cases and select those suitable for automation.

3. Build a script development environment (configure Eclipse, download the test framework, install the Android SDK, configure the environment, etc.)

4. Write test scripts based on use case descriptions

5. Debug and improve the script

6. Perform automated testing (you may need to build an environment where multiple devices can perform tests simultaneously)

7. The script is constantly maintained and updated during application upgrades and iterations, and is repeatedly executed

A test engineer working in a large domestic enterprise said that based on past experience, the proportion of test cases that can be automated in general test projects is about 30% to 50%. Some manual test cases need to be split to achieve better automation. Similar to unit testing and UI automation testing, one test case only verifies one test point, which is conducive to the writing and maintenance of test scripts.

This does not include the subsequent script writing and debugging. Assume that we have split the test cases and each test case only verifies one test point. For this type of test case, it takes 3 to 4 hours for a junior automated test engineer to complete the script writing and debugging of such a test case, and it takes about 1 hour on average for a mid-level or senior engineer. When it comes to the later maintenance stage of the test script, the time spent is even more unpredictable.

After communicating with this test engineer, I felt that the traditional testing model is a nightmare for fast-growing mobile Internet companies, a time-consuming and labor-intensive nightmare.

Ask your parents to solve the pain of traditional testing on the road to entrepreneurship

There are already some very mature cases of automated testing solutions for mobile applications in the market. The test engineer who did not want to be named said that there are several relatively mature automated testing software on the market that can be used to assist testing work.

iTestin is currently the most widely used tool in China, and some people also use Baidu's MTC and Yice Cloud's Radar, but they are still slightly inferior in terms of update frequency and maintenance enthusiasm. Most foreign automated testing tools are paid, and the cost is actually not low.

iTestin is a free Android automated test script recording tool launched by the domestic Testin Cloud Testing Company. iTestin can help your project team quickly implement functional automation testing of stable modules, or implement in-depth compatibility testing of a certain version.

iTestin can also directly capture the operator's operations on the tested application on a real mobile device, and directly generate a functional test script that can be executed across resolutions. The script can be reused between multiple versions of the application, and can be submitted to the cloud testing platform at any time and repeatedly executed on more than 1,000 real devices. The test report includes the verification results of the functional points covered by the test script package, as well as logs, screenshots, and performance data during the test process. By using iTestin, you may only need one black box test engineer to start automated testing within a day.

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From another perspective, iTestin allows a person with no testing experience to complete tedious and mechanical testing work. In other words, you can even call your parents to help you with the testing work, adding a dramatic element to your entrepreneurial journey.