Test automation is the use of software to control the execution of tests, the comparison of actual outcomes to predicted outcomes, the setting up of test preconditions, and other test control and test reporting functions. Commonly, test automation involves automating a manual process already in place that uses a formalized testing process (wikipedia.org).
As per wikipedia.org:
Test automation is the use of software to control the execution of tests, the comparison of actual outcomes to predicted outcomes, the setting up of test preconditions, and other test control and test reporting functions. Commonly, test automation involves automating a manual process already in place that uses a formalized testing process.
There are two general approaches to test automation:
Code-driven testing. The public (usually) interfaces to classes, modules or libraries are tested with a variety of input arguments to validate that the results that are returned are correct.
Graphical user interface testing. A testing framework generates user interface events such as keystrokes and mouse clicks, and observes the changes that result in the user interface, to validate that the observable behavior of the program is correct.
The principle of automated testing is that there is a program (which could be a job stream) that runs the program being tested, feeding it the proper input, and checking the output against the output that was expected. Once the test suite is written, no human intervention is needed, either to run the program or to look to see if it worked; the test suite does all that, and somehow indicates whether the program's output was as expected.
Test Automation also has dedicated section in Software QA & Testing community.
