You’ve spent months designing and developing new website or application features that will enhance your association’s digital presence. Now it’s launch time.

When you go live, what are the chances that the new features will work as intended? With automated testing, you can make sure a digital product launch will go smoothly.

Automated testing is a key process for quality assurance in digital product development. It speeds up regression testing—the act of confirming that existing website or app features work alongside a new software system or code changes—using scripted tests.

Previously, regression testing needed to be done manually. In preparation for a digital product launch, test or quality assurance engineers used a computer to manually run through scenario-based testing to ensure a new feature wouldn’t crash an existing website or app. That approach was tedious, time-consuming, and fraught with the risk of human error because it was dependent on someone executing tests correctly and keeping accurate track of results.

When to Use It

With modern testing tools, it’s possible to design and write test scripts of code that run in an automated fashion as part of the DevOps process, a methodology that brings together software development and IT operations teams on technology projects.

Creating automated regression tests (ARTs) takes time upfront and should be planned for as part of a digital product development lifecycle, but once created, ARTs can do the heavy lifting, freeing up staff to focus on additional performance testing and tasks.

When you go live, what are the chances that the new features will work as intended? With automated testing, you can make sure a digital product launch will go smoothly.

Additionally, ARTs can be offloaded to remote servers, so you don’t have to tie up existing computer hardware and infrastructure space. The result is that your association can deploy website and application enhancements quickly without service interruptions.

ARTs are especially useful for:

• testing online forms
• clicking links and confirming landing pages
• verifying text or elements on a web page
• testing application programming interface (API) requests.

Tools to Use

To collaborate on ART development and off-load testing to other computer resources, DevOps teams need three main tools:

Software. Automation testing software replaces the work of a traditional tester browsing manually through scenarios. My team uses a free software called Katalon Studio. In Katalon, we write and run our tests. When tests are run, the software produces reports that quickly show whether the site or application being tested is behaving as expected.

Repository manager. Any DevOps team should rely on a code repository—GitLab is one example. This tool helps the team share documentation and supports collaboration as a digital product goes from planning to execution to verification and completion.

Open-source server. The team will also need an open-source server to act as the test-runner for ad hoc, scheduled, or coordinated testing. My team uses an automated open-source server system called Jenkins to run ARTs through every deployment, regardless of whether we are pushing code to QA, stage or production environments. Jenkins surfaces the testing results for each run and notifies the team once ARTs are complete.

Having ARTs available and ready to run through all stages of product development can save hours of manual testing. And with each deployment, the ARTs add value as it continues to save time and provide testing coverage for additional deployments.

Creating an automated testing program with these or other tools has traditionally been done by technical quality assurance teams. However, as tools evolve, it’s becoming easier and more user-friendly for associations to be involved in QA, saving time, money, and resources on digital upgrades that can significantly improve the member and customer experience online.