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The Essential Guide To End-to-End Testing | E2E Testing 101

End-to-end testing is one of the most effective ways to ensure the quality of the product you will be shipping. However, it’s not an easy task to make a jump to this methodology. If the thought of end-to-end testing makes you sweat, this article will help you shape up.

What is End-to-end Testing?

End-to-end (E2E) testing is defined as a technique that tests the entire software product from beginning to end to ensure the application flow behaves as expected. The goal of this testing type is to test from the end user’s experience. It also helps define the product’s system dependencies and ensure all integrated pieces work together as expected.

Why E2E testing matters

E2E testing matters to many groups within an organization, such as managers, testers and developers.

Managers: Managers like this testing procedure as it lets them know how a failing test would impact the user.

Testers: Testers find E2E testing useful as it helps them verify real-world behavior, and as such, they can avoid problems and achieve a greater sense of accomplishment.
Developers: Developers benefit from it because most of the testing is offloaded to others.

Benefits of E2E Testing

The adoption of E2E testing yields the following advantages:

Expand test coverage
Ensure the correctness of the application
Reduce time to market
Reduce cost
Detect bugs

E2E Testing Life Cycle

An end-to-end testing life cycle consists of the following main components:

Test planning: Specifies key tasks, associated schedule, and resources
Test design: Test specifications, test case generation, risk analysis, usage analysis, and scheduling tests
Test execution: Executes test cases and documents testing results
Results analysis: Analyzes test results, evaluate testing, and perform additional testing if necessary

When to Apply E2E Testing?

E2E testing is regularly conducted on finished products and systems, making each review a test of the completed system. A second test will take place if the system does not output what is expected or if a problem is found. In this case, the team will have to record and analyze the data to determine the issue’s origin; then fix and re-test them.

Learn more on how to implement an E2E testing scenario in this article

E2E Testing Methods

Vertical E2E Testing

This method refers to testing in layers, meaning that tests happen in sequential, hierarchical order. To ensure quality, each component of a system or product is tested from start to finish. Vertical testing is often used to test critical components of a complex computing system which does not typically involve users or interfaces.

Horizontal E2E Testing

A commonly used method occurring horizontally across the context of multiple applications and easily takes place in a single ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) application. Here’s an example. A Web-based application of an e-commerce system includes accounts, product inventory status, and shipping details.

Metrics For E2E Testing

Some of the many metrics used for E2E testing are:

Test Case Preparation Status: Used to determine the specific position of the test cases that are under preparation, compared to planned test cases.
Test Progress Tracking: Test progress should be tracked on a weekly basis. This step will provide regular details of test completion percentage, such as passed/failed, executed/unexecuted, valid/invalid test cases, and so on.
Defects Status and Details: It gives a weekly percentage of open and closed defects. Also, weekly defect distributions are based on severity and priority.
Environment Availability: The actual number of operational hours and hours scheduled per day for testing.

Automate End-to-End Testing in Katalon Studio

Katalon Studio is an excellent automation tool that can make your end-to-end tests less complicated. There are three core features in Katalon Studio that you can use to apply E2E testing: recorder, built-in keywords, and custom keywords.

Conclusion

Nowadays, software systems are complex and interconnected with numerous subsystems. If any of the subsystems fails, the whole software system could crash. And this is a major risk and can be avoided by E2E testing. This explains, in part, why E2E testing are currently widely adopted in the industry. So now it’s a good time for you to start learning E2E testing if you haven’t done so, it will be a valuable skillset with high demand for the future to come.

5 Continuous Testing Best Practices | Tester Can’t Live Without

Katalon Studio Team Leave a comment

Continuous Testing is crucial in a modern development environment because it helps bring testing up to speed with the pace of Agile development. However, implementing Continuous Testing is a complex task as it requires strategic planning process and many changes would need to be put in place. To help you make the best decision for your software testing needs, below are 5 best practices that you should consider to help you effectively build a continuous testing strategy.

5 Best Practices to Implement Continuous Testing

Adopt More Test Automation

While manual testing is laborious and time-intensive, automation gives time back to your engineers to actually fix the bugs found during testing. The best part about test automation is the quick feedback the team receives. Continuous testing allows early and often feedback so that changes can be made far before releasing features to the market. So, automating as much as you can in the development lifecycle will help you achieve faster releases.

Some popular continuous testing tools that are currently available in the market are: Katalon Studio, Selenium, Appium, Eggplant, Watir, etc.

Tool Integration

Continuous testing is not just about automation. It involves teams using proper tools to make the testing process easier, faster, comprehensive, and more effective. Such as tools that work with the dev toolchains to remove the manual overhead (where possible). Additionally, tools that remove/reduce mundane operations for testers, enabling them to focus on what is important: testing.

Tracking Metrics

Use quantifiable metrics to keep track of your success or failure rate during testing. Continuous testing offers immediate results to see if the software is working as expected. Hard data yield results to measure progress and quality outputs. Tracking how many bugs are found and corrected provides continuous validation for your business value ROI.

Two key metrics that you need to be sure to keep track of are: counts of defects and counts of fail/pass test scripts. Tracking the number of defects discovered in your testing process will help you determine if the number increases or decreases. If it increases, strategize ways to change your development process; if it decreases, keep up the great work! Additionally, keeping track of the number of pass/fail test scripts will help you produce a comprehensive testing strategy to create better functionality for your application.

Leverage Containerization

Containerization refers to the process of bundling all components of an application together – including configuration files, libraries, and dependencies – within its own operating system.

Containerization makes continuous testing easier to process by keeping each service of the application in its own environment. Imagine being able to test only the specific code that you need at one time, rather than the entire application.

Also, using containers for your test environments keeps the often difficult-to-maintain environments up-to-date with the latest code changes that would be released to production. Furthermore, if the test suite fails or if the data ends up corrupted, the container can be discarded and another one set up with fresh data.

Keep Communication Transparent

Keep your communication lines transparent to prevent the testing pipeline from becoming siloed. Bottlenecks can form when communication between other teams or roles within the same team are not transparent, resulting in time wasted that could otherwise be spent more productively. It’s like a well-choreographed dance. The steps have been set in place and you need to learn how to move fluidly with your partner to smoothly fulfill all the steps. Active communication is the key to achieving the balance necessary to effectively carry out continuous testing.

More best practices could be found here

Conclusion

Continuous testing is beneficial in so many ways, but it can also be very challenging. Above are 5 best practices that you should consider to help you effectively build a continuous testing strategy. Make sure you have a solid plan in place before incorporating this testing procedure into your organization.

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