Software tests are currently performed manually in many cases. They are time-consuming and inefficient. 

If you want super-fast and highly precise testing, automated test procedures are the right choice.

COVID-19 Shutdown: Driving Digital Transformation?

The Corona pandemic and the subsequent government-ordered shutdown have left profound changes in their wake. Even though due to social distancing fewer people have been sickened, the long-term effects of the contact restrictions cannot yet be foreseen. As far as the global economy is concerned, the consequences of the shutdown are already becoming evident. The U.S. economy alone is currently experiencing the highest number of unemployed since the great economic crisis of the 1930s. In other countries, the economic situation looks similarly dramatic. The majority of companies have suffered heavy financial losses, which will probably have sad consequences for some employees. Nevertheless, there are some industries that are benefiting from COVID-19 and the shutdown: Telecom companies, online stores, pharmaceutical companies and businesses in the healthcare industry have seen considerable growth rates as a result of the imposed restrictions on working hours and the forced work in the home office.

Compared to previous economic crises, which only negatively affected some industries, the shutdown, which has been implemented in almost all countries, is harming almost the entire global economy. Wolfgang Platz, one of the founders and the CSO of Tricentis GmbH, recently evaluated some current statistics. He came to the conclusion that especially airlines and car manufacturers are the big losers of the shutdown. COVID-19 is causing a 44% drop in business air traffic, according to conservative estimates. Road traffic also came to an almost complete standstill. As for the automotive industry, experts predict that sales declines in new car purchases will range between 20% and 40% – a trend that will continue into 2021.

Prior to COVID-19, manufacturing companies had high cost but low time-to-market pressures if they wanted to deliver products of consistently high quality. These two factors have taken on a whole new meaning as a result of the pandemic and its economic consequences: companies will have to work much more efficiently after COVID-19 if they want to survive in the market. But this is only possible if they implement the digital transformation faster than before. Only by doing so can they reduce the financial damage caused by the shutdown to a tolerable level. Automated software testing makes an indispensable contribution to digital progress.

How software test automation works

Automated software tests run at significantly higher speed and with extreme precision. In addition, they are much more cost-effective than manual testing. Without compromising the quality of the software, of course. The smart test systems are either hybrids, in which Artificial Intelligence works together with human intelligence, such as in the older version of Tricentis Tosca. They use what is known as augmented intelligence. Or function 100% AI-based.

The current software testing landscape is determined by manual tests. According to many years of experience of automation experts, these are quite unreliable and often take too long. When it comes to manual selection of test cases, many business customers are overwhelmed by the complexity of these systems. They select them and the design test cases using only their intuition, which experience has shown to be insufficient. Designing test cases is necessary to cover new test requirements. Software testing is usually followed by analysis and evaluation of the test results. According to the automation expert Platz, there is a problem with this point as well: The importance of evaluation is underestimated by most business users. For the sake of efficient testing, however, the right test cases must be selected. This is done, for example, with the help of Tricentis qTest. This solution uses AI-based change impact analysis when selecting test cases.

In order to identify the positive effects of automated testing, the international automation company Tricentis conducted a survey among the 3,000 largest SAP business users. The ERP system SAP was relevant for the survey because it is used by a large number of business customers. Tricentis came to the sobering conclusion that only 10% of the SAP companies interviewed operate mature testing. 90% use key users as testers. These selected employees test the software for one to two weeks until its first deployment. In the subsequent hyper-testing phase, developers and other IT experts work alongside the key users to clean up software errors that occur in the production area.

During the hyper-testing phase, which lasts two to three months, the key users also bear the greatest responsibility: they are responsible for analyzing the software errors that occur and testing the program again. LiveCompare was developed to relieve the key users of this burden. This Tricentis product works with an algorithm controlled by AI components. LiveCompare reduces the number of test cases by an average of 85%. What remains are 479 high-risk objects. Compared to this, traditional testing reduces the scope of testing by just about one-third, from 3,152 to 2,270 cases, according to the aforementioned survey of SAP-using companies.

However, LiveCompare not only reduces the scope of key user tests, but also increases their precision. As a result, the hyper-testing phase can be drastically shortened and software errors occurring in production can be reduced by 75%. Traditional software testing is significantly inferior in efficiency because of the effort involved in technical scripting. Proven automation solutions are now available for this as well: Tricentis Tosca, for example, uses Model Based Test Automation (MBTA). It is combined with the NEO Engine, which, like other solutions from the provider, uses artificial intelligence. Companies using Tosca with NEO do not need to hire programmers or write technical scripts. Pure Model Based Test Automation without NEO Engine works on the basis of a technical information called a model. This acts as a link between the system environment and test cases.

The intelligent model programs the software testing and executes it automatically. This allows test automation to be used even by users who do not understand its technology. As the latest Tosca version works with the NEO engine, however, it no longer requires any technical information. NEO is the abbreviation for Neural Optical Engine. It processes visual information at great speed: 40 frames per second instead of the 24 frames that are usual for the human eye. But that’s not all: the NEO Engine is more than 95% more accurate than the human eye in terms of object recognition and OCR.

Tricentis developed this revolutionary optical technology in November 2019 and has since further improved it. As a result, business customers will find a NEO Engine integrated into Tosca as of May 2020. With this latest Tosca version, they are able to explore via MBTA end-to-end testing even APIs, user interfaces, business intelligence solutions, programming languages, databases and standard software. The engine is now technically mature, having been trained with over 10 million different controls. Thanks to the optimized NEO Engine, Mature Testing can be performed quickly, accurately and easily even for non-programmers. The Tricentis Analytics testing platform combines all three of the vendor’s main products LiveCompare, qTest and Tosca with NEO. Currently, the developers are working on equipping qTest with the engine as well.

How to eliminate false positives in software testing

False positive test results are a major problem in software testing. But the use of Comprehensive Automation such as Tricentis Tosca with NEO is also of help. Surveys conducted by the vendor conclude that 72% of errors are not real errors because the software is working properly. The real sources of errors are test circumstances such as test environment and test data, as well as the tests themselves. One third of these 72% “errors” are the result of automation problems. These include software maintenance not working properly. In addition, flaky tests are quite common, also causing unnecessary costs to companies because they produce unreliable results. Thanks to model-based automation and the integrated NEO engine, Tosca Test Data Management is able to solve all software maintenance problems.

Compared to manual testing, where risk coverage is as low as 20%, Tosca delivers more than 80%. The innovative test automation solution can even predict whether a software implementation is likely to trigger flaky testing if it is not technically revised. In order to meet the even greater demand for digital business solutions according to COVID-19, many companies will move their data to the cloud before the end of 2020. This is the view of 85% of CXOs surveyed during the CXO Survey “Post COVID-19 Impacts to IT”: companies will migrate their main systems to the cloud and switch to IaaS solutions. For peripheral applications, they are most likely to use SaaS providers. Business users using the Tricentis Analytics testing platform, with this integrated testing environment, are capable of

• manual testing
• test management
• analysis of the effects of changes
• test designs
• Test data management
• End-to-end testing
• load tests
• performance tests

to be carried out. Tricentis qTest and some of the components mentioned are already in the cloud, the rest will follow soon. Because false positives have a massive impact on test efficiency, Tricentis will conduct more research in this area in the future. Nelta GmbH & Co. KG uses the code-free and scriptless Continuous Testing with Tosca, which supports more than 160 technologies and business applications, for its Testing Engineer Services. Because we at Nelta believe that only the fast implementation of digital solutions brings companies the desired success. Therefore, in addition to IT consulting and manual testing, we offer quality control using Tricentis test automation solutions, test coordination and test management in particular. Furthermore, we are specialists for SAP business solutions.