When to Use Self-Healing in Test Automation
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Self-healing in test automation has become an increasing requirement for teams searching to accelerate the delivery of valuable software.
User interface elements have the tendency to rapidly change, directly impacting the stability of automated tests used to decide to proceed or not with a release.
That’s why it is important to understand when to use self-healing, and when more reliable techniques are available.
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The need for self-healing in test automation
The practice of test automation is becoming increasingly important in the software development lifecycle.
One of the key advantages of test automation is that it allows for rapid detection and correction of defects.
This becomes more difficult, however, as user interface elements change rapidly and unexpectedly.
That’s why self-healing tests are so important — they allow automated tests to correct themselves when something goes wrong.
There are situations when self-healing tests are appropriate and others cases requiring to use different techniques.
Use self-healing for non-regression of interfaces
Self-healing tests are best used when the test environment is subject to change.
For example, if you are testing a web application, the HTML code of the pages you are testing may change frequently.
If your test automation suite is not able to adapt to these changes, it will quickly become outdated and unreliable.
Self-healing test automation can help to overcome this problem by automatically correcting test scripts when the environment changes.
Use self-healing that you are able to implement
Systems that correct themselves are like a dream, but things rarely work that easily.
Self-healing have multiple implementation with different assumptions:
- Statistical algorithms will try to find the element with calculation on the differences between previous and…
