How To Reduce Software Testing Redundancy?

Software teams must make conscious efforts to prevent test suites from becoming overloaded with a prohibitive number of redundant test cases, despite the requirement for complete test coverage.

Software test redundancy occurs when multiple test cases have objectives that are either completely or partially overlapping. This means that the same code segments, functionalities, and features are tested twice without being necessary. Without a method for designing test suites in a manner that decreases the number of repetitive tests, while safeguarding the vital ones, testing groups risk making shortcomings that can eventually upset improvement speed. Software Testing companies in the USA always consider this thing.

In this article, we look at how testing groups can settle on shrewd choices concerning what to keep, update, document, or erase in the work to develop a reasonable stock of test scripts, while as yet guaranteeing compelling inclusion, too as certain devices that can help.

Optimizing Testing Decisions

Continuous test optimization, which begins with designing tests to be atomic (one test for each test case) and autonomous (no test is dependent on another), is the key to reducing test redundancy. Assessing both individual test cases and the entire test suite is necessary to achieve the goal of test optimization, which is to extract the greatest amount of value from the smallest number of test cases.

A thorough examination of each test case’s relevance to current operations and value to the organization is necessary for optimizing a test suite. At some point, difficult decisions must be made regarding whether to deprioritize, archive, rewrite, update, or delete one or more tests.

While explicit circumstances might influence the choice, the following are a couple of overall rules programming groups can use to decide the best game plan:

·         Update and Rewrite. Remediation efforts are frequently appropriate for test cases that cover multiple test objectives, rely on the correct operation of other tests, or run for an excessive amount of time.

·         Remove. Experiments that reliably return flaky, mistaken, or uninformative outcomes ought to be eliminated. But be careful to make sure that those test cases aren’t suitable for a rewrite or update. 

·         Collection. When certain application features or components are removed from the codebase, test cases may become obsolete. However, rather than deleting these test cases, teams should think about archiving them; those features or parts may be brought back, which would mean that those tests could probably be used again with only minor updates. This also frequently applies to test cases involving unusual edge cases or legacy functionality.

·         Deprioritize. Teams may choose to simply deprioritize particular test cases within the suite as a whole, depending on the importance of the associated functionality. Test cases that cover features related to crucial business processes or deal with high levels of code complexity, for instance, ought to be given higher priority than those that involve straightforward, lower-level functionality.

Reducing Test Redundancy

In order to reduce test redundancy, teams must constantly audit test suites because test optimization is an ever-evolving process. A comprehensive post-release review of a test suite, particularly a regression suite, can consume a significant amount of team time. This is practiced by software testing companies in the USA.

However, teams can minimize these review times by actively addressing problematic tests and code sections as they arise. This can be helped by tools like Hexawise and Ranorex DesignWise, which allow teams to input test scenarios and run algorithms that find redundant test cases. This is especially helpful for applications that require complex testing routines. In addition, these tools typically offer test coverage reporting, which is useful for auditing the suite as a whole.