Regression testing: Definitions, benefits, techniques, and tools

Overview

Along with the development of software product is the requirement of continuous functionality improvements and innovations. However, it remains a challenge to balance sprint development and iterative testing to avoid conflicts as product matures. Regression testing emerges as a solution to tackle this challenge. This article will help you better understand about the definitions, benefits, techniques as well as automation tools used to implement regression testing.

What is Regression testing?

Regression testing is defined as a software testing solution responsible for the overall stability of product when any code changes or updates are added to the source code. Developers and testers should bear in minde that any seemingly insignificant alterations can cause adverse effects for the whole system and damage the product's functionalities. Therefore, regression testing is applied to minimize the risks of dependencies, defects or malfunctions due to code changes.

Before all the changes are integrated into the main development branch, they have to undergo multiple testing in the process. Regression is typically the final step to ensure the entire application still perform as expected.

When to apply Regression testing?

There are some typical circumstances that regression testing must be implemented:

• A new requirement is added to an existing feature
• A new feature or functionality is added
• The codebase is fixed to solve defects
• The source code is optimized to improve performance
• Patch fixes are added
• Changes in configuration

What is the benefits of Regression testing?

When product teams apply regression testing in testing process, they can detect and eliminate all bugs or defects that may cause detrimental effects on product functionalities early in the deployment cycle. Therefore, regression testing not only helps reduce the time, cost and effort invested to resolve build-up defects, but it also accelerates the time-to-market of software product.

Other significant benefits of regression testing is aligning the newly added features with the existing ones to mitigate their conflicts as well as avoid functionality crash. Accordingly, without regression testing, developers or testers may find it difficult and time-consuming to investigate the primary cause and the architecture of the product.

If your team are working for a project that requires frequent modifications or continuous improvements, regression testing is crucial to maintain product quality.

How to implement regression testing?

A typical regression testing process goes through these basic steps:

• Detect the code alterations in the source code; then identify what components of them were changed as well as their effects on existing codes.
• Streamline the testing process, build appropriate test cases and testing tools based on the priorities of those changes and product requirments.
• Determine entry point and entry criteria to guarantee that the application satisfies preset eligibitiy before implementing regression test.
• Determine the final point for the eligibility set in step three.
• Prepare all test components and Schedule the appropriate time for test execution.

There are three common techniques that are widely applied in regression test:

• Complete regression: regression testing is executed on all test suites
• Partial regression: select some relevant components that may be affected by code changes to run regression testing
• Test case prioritization: prioritize some test cases to perform first. Those test cases are chosen based on some criteria like failure rate, business impact or gradually used functionalities.

Best automation tools for regression testing

Automation testing tools are crucial to regression testing as they reduce tremendous time and tension caused by repeating test cases manually many times. Here are some best test automation tools that facilitate developers and testers to
optimize their regression testing process:

1. Katalon Studio
Katalon Studio is an end-to-end automation solution that designs testing processes easy and accessible for testers in all programming levels.This tool provides an all-in-one regression testing solution for your website, web services, and mobile application. Katalon Studio also supports running scripts on multiple devices, browsers, and environments.

2. Selenium
Selenium is considered among the top tools for browser-based and cross-platform regression testing. It provides a set of features in order to automate web applications. Selenium is a proper option for large-scale quality assurance teams with advanced testers rather than small or mid-size team.

3. Watir
Watir (Web Application Testing in Ruby) is an open-source library using the Ruby programming language. It enables you to write tests that are readable and maintain on a lightweight and flexible user interface. Watir offers diverse user interaction capabilities for website testing, such as clicking links, filling out forms, and verifying texts on a variety of browsers.

4. IBM Rational Functional Tester
Rational Functional Tester, or RFT, is a solution for software test automation from IBM. It can be used for a wide range of software testing types, including functional, regression, GUI, and data-driven testing, and applications (web-based, .Net, Java, Siebel, SAP), and more.

5. Apache JMeter
Apache JMeter is an open-source test automation software used to load functional test behaviors and measure test performance. It is capable of many testing Clfeatures, including support for load and performance tests on many different applications, server or protocol, as well as providing a whole regression test suite for the end users.

Conclusion

With all the values it brings to software product, regression testing is worth for product teams to put more investment into building the ultimate strategies with automated regression testing. The more well-prepare regression testing practice is, the more you can keep your budget, process and resource on track effectively.

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