Building tests is only half the battle. When a test fails understanding why is of utmost importance if we want to improve quality and not just test for testing's sake.
We often lose sight of why we're testing. Testing for testing's sake is an exercise in futility. At the most fundamental level, testing is done to help with finding and fixing bugs for users. A failing test does not directly benefit a user, nor does an open bug report; a bug found and fixed before a user can find out about it is what users value!
Building tests is only half the battle: testers devote a significant amount of time to maintaining and investigating tests, often requiring more resources than test authoring. When a test fails, we cannot say we have found a bug without further inquiry. More often than not, a failing test indicates new functionality or behavior in the application that is expected, and so the test needs to be maintained. We need to get to the root cause of the failure for the test to be meaningful.
Testers and engineers are not a cheap or plentiful resource, nor is releasing software that has failed tests without understanding why a wise decision. Therefore, the root cause analysis of failures represents an important area where efficiency and accuracy can dramatically impact ROI and may even be business-critical. How can we make sure our failing tests are meaningful?
Tests are only as good as the problem that they fix. Automated tests may fail in situations where an end-user would have no problem interacting with an application. This could be due to:
If we take it back to first principles, it is key to test to improve the user experience; after all, there is no point in allocating resources to testing if you do not improve the product from the users' perspective. To do so, you need to know why a test failed. You need root cause analysis. Root cause analysis is quite straightforward to define but not always that easy to perform. Put simply, it is identifying what caused a test to fail. It is a process that seeks to find the origin of a problem and answer why the problem happened. There's a wide range of advantages of root cause analysis that are many and well documented: finding bugs earlier gives a greater ROI; faster time to market; etc. The challenge is adopting the right approach and tooling to take advantage of its benefits quickly and easily.
Those familiar with Virtuoso will be well aware that we approach testing on a holistic level - we help our users ship better quality products faster. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that helping teams with root cause analysis is top of our agenda. This is why we developed our root cause analysis feature, which gives you all the information you need to locate the genesis of problems at a glance:
Once you have identified the root cause (whether it was due to a regression, flaky environment, or another reason), you can provide a reason for the failure and get all the information presented to you instantly in a handy report. As Virtuoso tracks your execution history, even the most granular of information is at your fingertips. Focus right down to the test steps level and see screenshots, network traffic details, and much more. You can find out more about the feature here.
Root cause analysis represents a great opportunity for teams to improve the quality of their product, reduce maintenance overhead, ship faster, and increase customer satisfaction. Virtuoso is committed to providing its users with features that enable them to find the underlying reason for a problem and not just automate tests. And as we combine this approach with the latest developments in AI/ML, our vision is to accelerate the benefits of root cause analysis offered as part of our vision for the future of testing.
