How to Improve Test Coverage Using Automated Test Case Generation?

How to Improve Test Coverage Using Automated Test Case Generation?

Have you ever launched a feature only to find bugs that your QA team overlooked? Even the best manual testers can gloss over edge cases or workflows that don't get used often.


Automated test case generation comes in at this point! When you have a system that simply generates tests based on application behavior, APIs, or historical behavior, your team can quickly scale your testing efforts across your application, allowing you to avoid potential issues before your feature is released to production.


In this article, we'll discuss how you can use automated test case generation to increase your test coverage, improve efficiency, and ensure an effective slick reliable QA process remains intact.


Why Test Coverage Matters?


Test coverage is a measure of how much of your application's functionality or code is exercised by your tests. The more complete your test coverage is, the less risk there is of an undiscovered bug, which increases the reliability of the software and enables confident deployments.


The challenge of effectively managing test coverage is that it is extremely time consuming and labor intensive to achieve this manually, particularly for complex applications with regular releases that are constantly changing. The process of automated test case generation will provide strategic value here.


How Automated Test Case Generation Functions?


Automated test case generation creates test scripts utilizing algorithms or AI-driven tools based on user interactions with the application, or the use of the API (Application Programming Interface) to test the application. These tools will analyze patterns and expected results to create meaningful tests in order to supplement manual testing.


By having a variety of types of tests automatically generated, the team can spend less time manually writing tests, which allowed the team to include testing in more edge cases or cases with repeated workflows.


Key Benefits for Test Coverage 


Automated test case generation provides multiple benefits for increasing test coverage:


Addresses the Gaps of Manual Testing: Manual test cases frequently miss edge scenarios. Automated generation means there are less 'obvious' paths that can be tested.


Scale in Large Applications: In minutes instead of hours to author tests, you could have hundreds or thousands generated covering large applications and different modules and integrations.


Assists in Continuous Testing: If automated test case generation is integrated into CI/CD (Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery) pipelines, generated tests can run automatically, keeping test coverage current on every code commit.


Decreases Human Error: With automation, you will have consistency in the tests produced for quality, avoiding typos or logical errors that can happen in manual testing.


Improving Test Coverage with Automated Test Case Generation


Here are suggestions to help teams implement automated test case generation effectively to improve coverage:


1. Evaluate Your Current Coverage


Next, evaluate your test coverage before adopting automation. Try to find gaps in your unit, integration, and API testing. Use numbers from CI/CD systems or code coverage tooling to determine where to direct your efforts. 


2. Select an Appropriate Tool


Choosing the right tool is an integral part of the process. Keploy is an excellent choice, as it automatically generates functional and API tests from real traffic to the application, tracks your coverage, and integrates into CI/CD pipelines in a seamless way.


Other options are available that may include either AI-powered frameworks or general open source tools, but the important part is to choose a solution which gives you the least friction to implement, can adjust to your tech stack, and generates tests you can take action on.


3. Connect to CI/CD Pipelines


Automated test case generation provides the greatest amount of value when coupled to continuous integration and delivery. Whenever you commit code, new tests can be generated and executed automatically, which helps to ensure test coverage is in sync with your codebase. Test code coverage should evolve when your codebase undergoes changes. This process can help reveal regressions sooner rather than later and reduce any gaps in coverage over time. 


4. Evaluate and Maintain Generated Tests


There is still a need for oversight over test automation, even automated tests. Tests should be reviewed on a regular basis to assess relevancy, removing duplicate tests and flaky tests from previous iterations. Tracking pass/fail rates, execution times, and coverage contributions are all data that needs observation over time to clean-up the suite. 


5. Supplement with Manual Testing


The automated test generation should only be treated as a means of supplementing the manal test. Exploratory testing, usability testing, and business-critical workflows will all require insight from a human tester. The use of both test automation and manual testing will provide robust coverage.


Best Practices for Improved Test Coverage


To get the maximum benefit from automated test case generation:






Facilitate collaborative efforts between QA, Development, and product teams to validate the significance of the tests being generated.


Tools To Enable Faster Test Coverage


There are many tools that can allow teams to generate automated test cases successfully:





The right choice of tooling offers to make sure your test coverage improves while not adding excessive maintenance work on you or your team.


Conclusion 


Automated test case generation is an effective method to improve test coverage, lessen manual work, and ensure quality assurance processes are being flattened and reliable. By selecting the appropriate tools, integrating them into CI/CD workflow, and establishing best practice for how to maintain and review them, teams encounter ever-broadening coverage and faster loops of feedback. 


Keploy and similar platforms make automated test generation and maintenance forebodingly simple, freeing up quality assurance teams to search for quality vs. writing repetitive tests. When done strategically, automated test case generation grows QA from being a bottleneck into a route to growth in software development.