Understanding OCR

OCR is a technology used to convert scanned documents or images containing text into computer-readable text, allowing automated data extraction and analysis.

Real-life Applications of OCR in Automation Testing

Extracting Data: Extract crucial information like invoice numbers from invoices, receipts, or forms. By using this, we can perform validations, ensuring that software correctly processes and stores such information.

Test Data Generation: Reads test data from legacy systems or documents and creates test scenarios and test cases, reducing manual effort in data preparation.

Example 1: Extract product details, prices, and customer information from invoices and purchase orders. This is used to perform end-to-end testing, ensuring accurate order processing and improving customer experience.

Example 2: Digitize prescriptions and medical reports which are used in automated testing of EHR systems, guaranteeing the correct storage and recovery of patient information, medications, and treatment histories.

Introduction to NLP

NLP is a branch of artificial intelligence that helps computers understand, interpret, and generate human language. Its role is to bridge the gap between human communication and machine understanding, allowing software to process, analyze, and respond to text and speech data in a way that resembles human language comprehension.

Real-Time Examples of NLP in Automation Testing

Log Analysis: Identifies patterns and errors in log data, automates the detection of exceptions, and reduces the need for physical log inspection.

Test Case Generation: Converts natural language requirements into executable test cases. By translating textual descriptions of desired functionalities, NLP streamlines test case creation, ensuring that test cases accurately reflect intended behavior and reducing the time required for test design and scripting.

Chatbot Testing: By simulating user conversations with natural language, NLP ensures the chatbot’s understanding and ability to provide appropriate responses, improving overall functionality and user experience.

Accessibility Testing: Assesses the clarity and correctness of textual content for screen readers and visually impaired users.

Localization Testing: Automatically compares source and target language content to ensure that localized versions of software or websites accurately reflect the original text and cultural requirements for various global audiences.

Integration of OCR and NLP

Combining OCR and NLP in automation testing allows for advanced capabilities, such as extracting and comprehending text from images or documents, enabling sophisticated data validation and test case generation.

Extracting Text from Images: OCR can extract text from images, making content machine-readable. NLP can then analyze the extracted text, allowing automation scripts to validate the information in image-based UI testing.

Sentiment Analysis on User Reviews: NLP can perform sentiment analysis on user reviews, categorizing opinions as positive, negative, or neutral. Combined with OCR, you can extract textual reviews from images or unstructured data sources, enabling automation to assess user sentiment without manual data entry.

Benefits of Using OCR and NLP in Automation Testing

The integration of OCR and NLP minimizes manual effort in data entry and test case generation, allowing testing teams to focus on higher-level tasks. Additionally, these technologies excel at handling complex scenarios, such as analyzing vast amounts of textual and visual data, enhancing test coverage, and overall testing effectiveness.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the synergy of OCR and NLP in automation testing promises a transformative leap in efficiency, accuracy, and coverage, ushering in a new era of software quality assurance where intricate testing challenges can be met with ease, precision, and speed.

The post The Role of OCR and NLP in Automation Testing appeared first on Indium.

One of the biggest challenges in the QA world is definitely test automation services. This can be very helpful, but you have to implement it correctly to have it work the way you want.

But once everything is added adequately and you improve on the process, nothing can really stand in your way. The results will be second to none and you can improve the quality while delivering the ultimate experience every time.

Thanks to proper software testing services you can easily integrate automated scripts. These help lower the number of repetitive tasks you need to do and the testing process will be shorter.

The DevOps practice is actually seeing test automation as a mandatory requirement. It manages to help boost productivity with up to 85%, sometimes even more than that.

The value is stunning, and some techniques like self-learning platforms and predictive analytics really help push things to the next level in a clever and powerful manner.

Developing the best test automation strategy might not feel simple at first, but the potential you get can be amazing, and here are the things that you have to keep in mind here.

Adapting to the right test cases that you can automate

It’s very challenging to write some automated test scripts, which is why you have to figure out what test cases tend to deliver the right automation benefit.

And that’s why you want to focus on things like large data sets, high risks, repetitive tests and tests for various environments and browsers.

It really helps a lot to tackle the right approach and once you do it right, the results can be very interesting and impressive as well.

The team can decide what software testing works and what can be improved. More often than not specific software testing approaches need to be used in order to boost the team capabilities and making sure that you are obtaining the best experience and results.

If you choose to write test cases for the base functionality, you can obtain results to shine and be extraordinary every time because of that.

The quality provided by test automation matters

The reason is simple, proper test automation can really deliver amazing results and the value itself can shine all the time. It’s all a matter of perspective and understanding how to plan everything strategically.

Since you can’t automate everything, you need a good assessment of the entire process and you have to figure out what works and what may not work the way you want.

Every detail is crucial here and based on that you can obtain some good results. It’s not simple if anything it’s well past that, but the payoff can be great and that’s what really matters the most no matter the situation.

Getting the right commands

You need to find and use keywords that are very well connected to your own business requirements. Once you have those, you will notice that things work a lot better and you can select what approach works for you here.

Tasks like login, upload and logout will be very helpful. But test automation works great when you have task-oriented commands and not stuff that’s way overly detailed.

Once you have a good understanding of this and the process, things will come to you more naturally. It’s a very good idea to understand the process and how it works in order to make everything better.

Unit testing

Unit testing matters here because it allows you to test a single unit at a time. You can employ a multitude of methods to see if they stick and then you adapt and adjust as you go along.

It’s a crucial thing to consider honestly, and it will deliver some resounding benefits if you choose to do it right. The true benefit related to all of this is that you can write detailed scripts, but try to do that one at a time.

It will usually become available from the development team, and you will like how everything works in a meaningful way.

Finalizing the process

You have to keep in mind that you need to create some scripts for the past sprints and ensure that everything is designed in house with the team. You want to have the teamwork adequately on everything and ensure that it works properly for the best outcome.

It’s a new and rewarding experience to know how to tackle everything, so as long as you do this right the payoff will be very good.

Testing the product requires a lot of back and forth, true, but it will be a very good experience and you really want to capitalize on that approach.

Create small test cases

You should always have some test automation cases and these have to be small. That helps a lot because you have all the navigation steps already detailed and you can study the process all the time.

You can easily improve the navigation aspect and then focus on underwriting. Overwriting will be a problem, make them simple as that will allow you to make changes a lot easier.

We believe that writing test cases that are independent of the UI will help a lot. Creating dependence on the UI means that you always need to rely on the interface and that’s not always good.

You want things to be easier and more convenient for you, and this approach can definitely help you achieve such a goal naturally. It’s still worth the effort, and you should totally consider keeping it in mind.

In the end, test automation has the potential to really help you quite a bit. But you need to have the right software testing strategy and you must work hard to bring in front the solutions and quality you want.

It’s not going to be easy to achieve a great experience, but try to commit to the process and make it work. Once you have the right test automation strategy into play, things will be a lot better and easier!

The post Your Step by Step Guide to Test Automation Strategy appeared first on Indium.

A leading global firm based in the US was developing a software tool for workforce management, employee attendance marking, collecting labour data and generating attendance summary of a large workforce.

The software was developed using .NET technologies and AJAX and Oracle 10G was the database used.

The customer was scouting around for the right testing partner, one who has the capability to manage the testing process at rapid speed, without sacrificing quality.

Importantly, the QA team at the customer site wanted a 100% automation-driven testing process, to reduce time-to-release, for every build.  Also, the project needed handling of multiple data sets for a highly data intensive application.

KNOWN CHALLENGES

The customer had prior experience with the test process, and they wanted to fix several known challenges during this project.

Specifically, the customer wanted to:

• Have skills to handle multiple data sets for a highly data intensive application
• Minimize manual testing, since it was slowing down time-to-release for every version
• Avoid unproductive time, rewriting and managing test scripts for different test browsers and environments

• Work with a team with prior expertise, rather than one that picked up new skills on the fly
• Partner with a vendor with expertise in preparing test data for a data-driven approach
• Build a robust framework that can optimize test execution and has reusable components

CUSTOMER HAPPINESS

The success of the project was best captured in this customer testimonial:

“Your framework is definitely the best, robust and highly maintainable in comparison to other frameworks that I have seen. The other vendors were not able to answer our questions and you guys certainly know what you do. This is the exact framework that I am looking to implement within our organization.” – QA manager

ADVANTAGE INDIUM

After evaluating several prospective partners, the customer had decided to go with Indium, we believe, for the following reasons:

• The iSAFE test automation framework has a flexible and robust architecture
• A high degree of integration with already invested and existing test automation services and test management tool

 OUR APPROACH

We devised the following approach using iSAFE framework, over the 12-month duration of the project. The project was staffed with two automation engineers, who were tasked with automating and maintaining over 750 test cases.

We adopted the following process for automation

PLANNING

• Defining the scope of Test Automation
• Understanding of Application/Test cases
• Identification of Reusable Components
• Sharing the observations/gaps in test cases

IMPLEMENTATION

• Customization of Framework & integration
• Implementation of data driven approach
• Development of Test scripts
• Checkpoint meetings

DESIGN

• Creation of Reusable Components, Objects Repository (OR) Designs
• Creation of Test Case & Test Data Designs
• Maintenance of clarification tracker
• Checkpoint meetings

EXECUTION

• Execution of Test Scripts Unit/Batch
• Stabilization of Test Scripts
• Exception handling/Recovery scenarios
• Capture failures and real-time reporting

IN NUMBERS

750

No of test cases automated, using the iSAFE framework

3 months

Time taken to script over 200 test cases with only 1 automation engineer

3x

Reduction in manual regression cycles

BENEFITS OF USING iSAFE

• The iSAFE framework was core to our ability to automate over 750 test cases
• Reporting at the end of every test is, of course, critical to any testing process. iSAFE triggers an automated email after each test to all stakeholders, helped developers modify code on the fly
• iSAFE helped test scripts run seamlessly on the staging site, thus helping save valuable time, enabling the customer to test code, right before production
• Overall, the customer was extremely happy to work with Indium on this project – thanks to its expertise in managing multiple data sets for a highly data intensive application and also the effectiveness of the iSAFE framework.

The post How Indium’s iSAFE Framework helped devise a 100% automation strategy for testing a workforce management software? appeared first on Indium.