Software applications which cater to trendy youth face gigantic challenges. They need to keep upgrading their apps regularly to keep pace with an ever-reducing attention span and a gregarious appetite for high-end features.  

This is true for apps from the gaming sector, fintech, trading, retail, etc which is used multiple times every day by millions of users.  

The challenge for software developers comes not only from racking their brains to create features, but also an endless and tireless requirement for testing, most of which might be repeat test cases. Manual testing can obviously not cater to this; in fact, even automated testing requires incorporation of some new-age technology to reduce testing time, efforts and improve accuracy.  

A robust test automation framework is the most important integrant that helps testers with guidelines or protocols to leverage reusable automated tests rapidly and reliably to achieve the desired testing goals.  In the absence of such a framework, automating more scripts, in the long run, will be a complicated, expensive, and time-consuming task since the need for manual intervention is required frequently.  

With Aspire’s Framework for Test Automation version 4.0 (AFTA 4.0), artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities have been leveraged to improve testing speed, reduce efforts and costs and bump up accuracy further.  AFTA is a selenium grid-based automation framework which is optimum, homegrown, open-source and focuses mainly on performing Functional Testing effectively and leverages the functional automation tools to conduct Non-Functional Testing. 

Why AFTA 4.0 is a Next generation Testing solution  

AFTA 4.0 is a dynamic framework for Test Automation requirements that effectively conducts all aspects of functional testing. It was designed considering the current and future technology needs. It is a versatile framework which is capable of multi-browser testing and multi-device testing and can be easily integrated with third party applications.  

AFTA 4.0 is integrated with Appium for covering iOS and Android Mobile/Tablets/iPad for Mobile automation. Same framework was used for Classic Web automation to support cross browser testing on Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari and Chrome extensions.   

The framework is built with several features which have a bearing on testing time and accuracy. For instance, an AI-powered report analysis portal helps save 70% on the time taken for result analysis.  

Its capability to integrate test automation with continuous integration tools is nothing less than an ideal solution for all the deploying and integration challenges that the testing teams face widely. It also offers seamless integration with Continuous Integration tools like Jenkins, Bamboo, and MS build. 

Features of AFTA 4.0  

Here are some features of AFTA 4.0 which help simplify testing with automation and AI:  

  • Self-healing Test scripts: Using AI, these scripts help improve testing accuracy 
  • Cloud Test execution: AFTA has in-built support to run scripts on various cloud test execution platforms like LambdaTest, Saucelabs and Browserstack 
  • Reporting: AFTA can generate rich HTML reports such as extent reports, testNG reports. It also features an AI-based report portal which reduces up to 70% time taken for failure analysis. It comes in-built with a dashboard that can be customized 
  • Features support to execute tests on Jenkins 
  • AUTO Page Object Model (POM): AFTA has a feature to automatically prompt for a pop-up during navigation and capture the elements from the UI. Locators are also automatically collected from the UI application on the pages it interacts with. Web scraping with Selenium allows and gathering of required data using Selenium Webdriver Browser automation. It crawls the targeted URL webpage and gathers data at scale. This collection of data locators improves upon the self-healing capabilities of AFTA. 
  • Supports parallel test execution  

Advantages of AFTA 4.0:  

  • Improved testing speed and accuracy  
  • Huge savings on testing costs. Cloud support translates into lesser costs for test set-up infrastructure 
  • Improved resource utilization and productivity 
  • Improved application stability and enhanced test coverage 
  • Early defect detection by shifting left the testing cycle 
How AFTA 4.0 is better than AFTA 3.0: 

The latest version of AFTA has a few significant features which build on existing ones to enable further cost and time savings and bump up accuracy of testing. Let’s delve into them.  

AFTA 4.0 Test Automation Framework

Automated Page Object Model (POM) 

This new feature in AFTA 4.0 builds on its self-healing capabilities using web scraping with Selenium and gathering data using Selenium Webdriver browser automation. A prompt for a pop-up comes up automatically during navigation and captures the elements from the UI of the software. Locators are collected from the website’s UI on the pages that the POM interacts with. This helps in improving the testing speed and reduction of efforts.  

Data Faker  

The biggest challenge in testing applications is the generation of data and the quantity to be tested as well. Data Faker provides a versatile solution for this, especially when dealing with domain-specific applications like, for example, Banking. Data faker creates random test data which is common across these domain-specific applications and hence saves up on testing time and effort as fresh capture of data is not necessary. 

Aspire’s AI-powered next-generation testing services leverages with the capabilities of AFTA 4.0 to deliver twin goals of speed and precision while handling huge workloads.  

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