- Regression testing is a type of software testing that makes sure that new code changes haven't broken older code.It's not enough to test the potential impact of a single change on the program; you have to test various scenarios and variations in order to be sure the changes are overall positive, or at least preferable. It's basically a way for programmers and developers to catch bugs before they're released into the wild.
Regression testing is a type of software testing that makes sure that new code changes haven’t broken older code. It’s not enough to test the potential impact of a single change on the program; you have to test various scenarios and variations in order to be sure the changes are overall positive, or at least preferable. It’s basically a way for programmers and developers to catch bugs before they’re released into the wild.
According to Wikipedia, “to minimize negativity from regression failures with minimal effort, automated regression tests are often run frequently on development builds of a system.” This means that after every time you update or work on your website/program/etc.
This is extremely important to test your website thorough.
A lot of people think that “if you aren’t broken, don’t fix it” or “it’s better for a website to stay as is” but this is a huge mistake, especially on newer websites.
Maintaining a website can be very time-consuming and tedious, and it takes a lot of time before you can get everything up to date. It’s not like that with web applications where once you install them on your server and then proceed to integrate the modules it’s relatively easy to work on.
An automated regression test is simply a series of tests that will run the application once you make a change. The idea behind it is that you can control the changes and its impact on the user’s experience. With automated regression tests, you can run your website through a set of tests, and you’ll immediately know if the change has affected the overall experience and performance on the website.
This way you can quickly isolate which part of the code broke something. The idea is that when you’re done making your changes, then simply run the test again, and it will show everything that changed and had an impact on performance or functionality. You’ll be able to see which part of your code affected things.
This way you can save tons of time by knowing exactly where every single change had an effect. It’s a very efficient way to fix bugs so that they don’t get to production, especially if they are relevant for end users.
Regression testing is extremely useful in software development. Think about all those times you’ve written code, and then a few months later you made some changes to it, and then it didn’t work right anymore or something broke. If there are problems like this with your website, creating automated regression tests will help a lot because you won’t have to go through every single change and test it manually before releasing it to the public.
Regression testing is great because it provides a huge amount of information about what happens when there are changes to the system, rather than to the individual changes that you made. The latter usually ignores what can happen with the code and analysis, and is often less useful than a bug report.
What are the different types of regression tests?
There are multiple types of regression tests like unit tests, functional tests, integration tests, acceptance test. Each type has its own importance and usefulness depending on the system design (in general, testing unit is not as important as testing functionalities). The goal of all of them is to ensure that the application’s functionality remains unchanged after any change in the system components. When it comes to regression testing, the most common test types are – “Regression Functional Testing” and “Regression Automation Testing”. This article will help you to understand the importance of Regression Automation Testing for your website.
Functional testing
Done to ensure that new or changed functionality works as expected for all of the specified user stories. The focus in on verifying that system interfaces still work as expected during the execution. Regular functional regression tests are built during development, and executed on every incremental product build or nightly build. Since this kind of testing is performed by a human, it might not be possible to fully automate all test cases in a complex application. However, testing can be broken down into different categories, and such a breakdown can be as simple as breaking down the functional parts of the application into small components. This will then allow the entire system to be tested separately for each component.
Automation testing runs automatically on a continuous integration server and tests all new code and existing code against the business rules of a system in order to detect any problems or defects in the existing code. Automation Testing is not only done during development, but also after deployment. It’s used to get a comprehensive view of the goings-on within your website or program, in order to notify you of any bugs or potential problems.
Regression testing is done when errors are found. Once an error is found, the developer will then need to test their fixes and make sure that they don’t create new errors; this is known as regression testing. For this reason, it’s important to use automation for regression testing. It will help save both time and money and give you more accurate results. This is why it’s really important to understand Automated Regression Testing.
A common form of regression testing is to ‘play the game’ and test known scenarios over and over again. Each time the results are compared to a baseline. This is called as un-constrained testing. Un-constrained or unconstrained testing is when there are no restrictions on what to test, how many times to test and what parts of the application should be involved in the testing process.
Feature-based regression testing
One of the easiest regression test suites to build is the ‘feature-based’ one. In this type, all the scenarios are represented by feature requests which can be accepted / rejected based on their business value, technical feasibility and cost. Feature based testing is good if you are new to regression testing and need to check out a lot of possible scenarios quickly.
This type of testing allows developers to choose what kind of regression tests (functional or non-functional) they want to run by choosing which features they have implemented.
It also reduces the complexity of testing and makes it easier for developers to quickly assess their code against business requirements.
Integration testing
It is done to ensure that during the execution of the application, different components such as database, XML, HTML, CSS or other files or objects are handled correctly. The integration tests should test all parts of same application. For example: SQL queries should be executed against database which handles data access along with XML files should be parsed and their structure tested using DOM and CSS stylesheets etc.
Integration testing is a good way of ensuring that all the layers in an application will perform together without any unexpected errors and inconsistencies.
Regression tests should ideally be conducted as often as necessary: This means for every change made in your application you should have a set number or percentage number of regression tests that are automatically run without user interaction.
Conclusion
Regression Testing is a critical part of the development process and helps to ensure that the operational changes are leaving your application in a better state than it was before changes were made. It’s the automated way of ensuring that every change you make does not break your website. This can save you time and money in the long run, especially if you’re using Web Applications for your website development needs.
Read more about how to test a UI with ruby here.