How to Analyze Your Test Automation Results

Data is only as good as the analysis that follows it. At the end of the day, organizations want to continuously improve and deliver high-quality applications to their customers. To achieve this, you need to effectively analyze your test automation results, pinpoint areas of concern, and use the results to fix mistakes. In this blog, we will cover five strategies you should consider to more efficiently and effectively analyze your test results.    

Get Your Test Automation Tool Right  

Before you start analyzing test results, you need to make sure you choose the right automation tool that fits the unique needs and requirements of your organization. Here are a few things you should consider during your evaluation: 

• Are you testing mobile, web, or hybrid apps?   
• What development frameworks are you currently using?   
• What development languages does your team use?  

With countless open source and closed source test automation tools on the market, it is critical to research and choose the right tool that makes sense for your organization.      

Related Resources >> How to Choose the Right Test Automation Tool   

Investigate Failures With Rich Artifacts  

When analyzing test results, the goal is to identify and resolve issues and bugs as soon as possible. Having access to rich artifacts is critical because they allow developers to eliminate bug reproduction time for faster fixes. A good test automation platform should provide rich test artifacts that can provide greater visibility into test failures including:  

• Videos  
• Screenshots 
• Crash logs  
• Vitals  

With Perfecto, you get a rich set of artifacts for your tests, including HAR files, videos, screenshots, vitals — including battery, memory, and CPU — device logs, execution logs, crash logs, and accessibility artifacts. Developers use Perfecto to quickly identify defects, access important information and rich artifacts, and execute tests against all platforms at once. Artifacts are important, and no other product provides more comprehensive test artifacts than Perfecto.  

Scale Your Test Analysis With Visual Validation  

As your test automation suites grow, they become more complex to manage, and there is a higher possibility of test case failures and errors. Conducting visual analysis (also known as visual testing) is important because it reproduces what your end-user will see, and helps you verify the accuracy of your app.   

With Perfecto’s visual validation capabilities, you can analyze screenshots and recordings of how your app performs, so you get a better idea of exactly what your end-user will see. You can see how your apps look across platforms so you can quickly spot any issues or errors and resolve them quickly.

Share Results & Reports, Reduce Time  

It is always better to resolve the error or bug in a test case sooner than later. Having access to a shared dashboard helps teams share results so developers and programmers can spot errors and solve them. The dashboards can be customized with various widgets that you can share with the whole team.  

You can create dashboards with specific requirements to share with team members. This way, team members only see the test results relevant to their projects. By splitting up dashboards, productivity is increased because it becomes easier to pinpoint errors in different results.   

Here are some examples of reporting dashboards that Perfecto offers, that can be shared amongst your team for maximum visibility into your test results: 

• Heatmaps: Get a high-level status of your tests with customizable heatmaps, complete with tagging and filtering. 
• Insights: The Insights view showcases a dashboard of data consisting of three powerful widgets that provide you with greater visibility and context into test status, so you can save even more time identifying, prioritizing, and fixing issues. Insights also provides intelligent analysis and actionable advice on how to proceed, so you can act quickly and improve your tests. 
• Report library: The Report Library presents a detailed overview of the tests run within a selected period, including statistical information for all listed tests, historical breakdown of when tests failed, and a table of all selected tests.  

Related Resources >> Perfecto Test Reporting & Analytics 

Power Up Your Analysis With AI & ML   

During testing, teams create unbelievable amounts of test results. There is a lot of data for testers to sort through and this becomes a job in itself. Testers are left sorting through too much noise, with not enough time, trying to find bugs amid flaky tests.    

Intelligent test automation and analytics can turn the mountain of data into useful information. With intelligent test automation, teams can more quickly and more accurately identify issues and take the necessary steps to resolve them. With AI and ML working on their behalf, teams can move faster, decide faster, and release faster. 

In reporting, ML and AI help filter through data and determine the core cause of bugs to increase team efficiency. By using an AI- and ML-based reporting solution, teams can worry less about the amount of data and let computers sort things for them. This removes noise from the pipelines and allows teams to deliver software faster and with confidence. By incorporating ML and AI into platforms, teams are more productive and adaptable. 

With Perfecto, teams can find issues faster with ML-powered noise filtering, which separates false negatives from the real failures that need to be fixed. This improves focus for the testing teams and helps make analysis much more productive.   

The Insights dashboard offers views to automatically and intelligently categorize your failures, so you can instantly identify the cause of the problem. This dynamic view also provides actionable advice on where to start to fix your issues so you can act quickly and improve your tests.   

Bottom Line    

Test reporting is essential. When done correctly, it reduces escaped defects, saves time, and results in better testing suites. By incorporating the strategies in this blog, you will get the maximum value out of your test analysis and data. 

Perfecto’s robust reporting platform provides actionable insights for your entire team — from developers to QA and practitioners to executive leadership. Get started with Perfecto’s test reporting, so you can more efficiently and effectively perform test analysis that will take your app quality to greater heights. 

FREE TRIAL    

DEMO PERFECTO