Test Automation for Mission-Critical Enterprise Software

They certainly can! In fact, software test automation providers like Cycle use the same browser web drivers that are available to your developers. While these open-source implementations are ideal for one-time projects (especially web), aggressive project timelines with complex business requirements often result in a large burden being placed on in-house development and QA resources. In these cases, a purpose-built test automation solution can provide significant direct and indirect ROI over the course of a multi-year deployment.

Cycle’s platform includes hundreds of pre-built utilities that empower your IT and QA teams to get started right away with building end-to-end tests across all required interfaces and our Cloud Appliance facilitates high-volume load testing at scale under simulated real-world conditions.

There are many companies that attempt to abstract the difficulties of test automation by saying they are “script-less.” The general understanding in the industry is that a “script” means programming and that means expensive personnel and high-maintenance. Most companies attempt to abstract the difficulties of test scripting by abstracting the script themselves and displaying a UI layer that feels more approachable than a traditional test script. The most modern version of this approach is called model-based testing. In model-based testing, the solution may scan a given application and produce a web-form style presentation layer that allows non-technical users to input test data without seeing any underlying scripting or coding. Sometimes, these solutions are smart enough to automatically adjust when the underlying system-under-test changes. The proposal here is that these changes being automatically updated reduces “script maintenance.”

Cycle focuses on enforcing better communication through a specific set of behavior-driven activities and practices where teams verbally communicate, discuss, and develop test documents as a group before system changes are made. These same documents are executable test documents, which provide significantly more value than a traditional model-based abstraction because they provide context, traceability, and understanding of the underlying process being tested. Cycle’s modern and approachable UI allows these documents to be used for regression testing by building playlists and group tests that can be run in serial or parallel execution via a task schedule or in integration with common CI/CD platforms like Jenkins or TeamCity. Cycle is the only behavior-focused testing platform on the market today that allows for authoring and execution of tests in the same approachable UI.