Automated Testing

               Although manual tests may find many defects in a software application, it is a laborious and time consuming process. In addition it may not be effective in finding certain classes of defects. Test automation is a process of writing a computer program to do testing that would otherwise need to be done manually. Once tests have been automated, they can be run quickly. This is often the most cost effective method for software products that have a long maintenance life, because even minor patches over the lifetime of the application can cause features to break which were working at an earlier point in time.

There are two general approaches to test automation:

• Code-driven testing. The public 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.