How Beekn complements traditional testing
Everyone who has ever dipped their toe in traditional QA knows that you can't beat manual testing. There is no lead time, no code, no complexity apart from the test itself. Depending on where you live, it's cheaper and easier to hire people off the street, put them in front of a computer, and give them a test script.
While more straightforward, the above have serious drawbacks. It's lengthy, requires supervision, and is usually incomplete. In an environment where agility and speed to market are essential, bringing a process from the ice age of computing as the sole testing principle may spell a recipe for disaster.
Imagine the following: your team just created an MVP. Afterward, your testers sat down, tested it, and after a month, your product went to market, where it was received with flying colors. Now that your product is out there, it's time to iterate and make it better. Your team creates a backlog of improvements but wait! Half of your backlog is improvements to your existing process – making it more robust, streamlined, faster. Fiddling there would mean you would have to spend another month testing! Not agile, is it?Here is where Beekn comes in to save the day. Its easy-to-use software is readily available, repeatable, and can help you in many ways: HTTP (non)functional tests like load and stress tests, database tests, testing your swagger endpoints, and more! But before Beekn leaps a building in a single bound, let's look at some other alternatives that may be useful.
Unit testing
Typically automated and built into the build process, these tests check whether specific functions produce the expected result. There are many pros to having UNIT tests, as it routinely checks your code remains specific. They're relatively inexpensive and easy to operate. So why isn't every company using them?
Having UNIT tests everywhere is useful yet redundant. Is your backlog growing because you lack programmers? Tough, they are the only ones that can create UNIT tests. Did you oversimplify your test and used basic test data? Chances are, your test may not be as comprehensive as you'd like.
Integration and System testing
These two tests usually follow each other – integration tests check that different parts of an application are communicating. In contrast, system tests check if the application is running as a whole.
Questions like:
- Are the servers running?
- Are the endpoints done?
- Are the databases complete?
are answered during these tests.
These tests are good but may give out false positives if you're not careful. They verify if they get responses but not if the responses are correct.
Automated End to End (E2E) testing
Grabbing Selenium and mashing it with Python is a great way to check whether your functionalities work like you want them to. Is your application desktop or mobile? Perhaps an RPA solution could work for you. There are numerous options available, and you need time and expertise to explore which one works for you. However, be mindful that you need to carefully plan out what you want to automate because this kind of automation can take a long time. Also, make sure that your interface doesn't change too much, or you'll be reengineering your code over and over to make it work!
Beekn lights the way
All of the above takes precious time, so this is where Beekn can really be an asset. It doesn't need a senior programmer. It doesn't need to be in the build process (although it can be included in one). It can be done at the beginning, middle or end. Moreover, it's fast. Easy to configure, fast to compile, fast to run. We're adding new features all the time (the newest being adding AI and Machine Learning to various DevOps processes), so the best time to start using Beekn is yesterday.