Regression Testing

by Webomates Inc Test Automation Company

If you are a fan of the Ice Age animated movie series, you might recognize this scene. In this scene, Scrat (the squirrel) is holding on to an acorn and trying to close one of the leaks from the iceberg. But that results in another leaking point elsewhere and when he tries to cover that leak, it results in another one with a cascading effect. Similarly, if we draw a parallel in the world of software development, there are times when fixing one bug might result in another bug(s) unintentionally. This is further compounded by the agile team, teams creating modifications and new features and releasing them continuously, which can introduce even more bugs. Regression testing plays a crucial role in getting a stable version of the software by taking care of finding such bugs before production deployment.

What is regression testing all about?

Regression testing is a type of software testing technique where the QA team runs a set of test cases to verify that with bug fixes or with the addition of new features in the application, the previous functionalities are not hampered.

In the agile methodology of software development, there are incremental changes and the frequency of lines of code change is high. Hence, there is a high probability of new bugs getting introduced. This leads to the need for regression testing to become an integral part of the software development life cycle.

Regression testing becomes even more important when the application is live and being used by the end-user and their reported issues are to be fixed on the highest priority.

After the software is made available to the end-user, especially during the beta testing phase, development teams do not have any control over the environment and the actions, that the end-users will perform while using the application. Those actions are the real-time, real-world actions as to how the application is intended to be used and this phase of testing brings in the most valuable feedback about the application. The feedback report might have bugs or errors which need to be fixed in order to achieve a version that can be released to the end-user for actual use.

Regression testing ensures the stability and quality of the release.

Let’s talk about types of Regression testing

Regression testing can be done on various scales, depending on the requirements of the application and the organizational structure. This invariably requires taking into consideration the cost and the manual efforts involved. Based on the current requirement of the project, one can go with either complete regression or partial regression.

Complete regression involves going through the entire application or website once again to make sure that all the functional areas are working as expected and none of the current functionalities is hampered. This can either be done manually or can be automated as well. For the automation, there are various frameworks available in the market like Selenium or Capybara using which the software testers can automate their regression suite so that whenever this needs to be done before an important release, it can be done swiftly and quickly covering all the major areas of the application. This is a time-saving option when looking for complete regression. However, this requires a lot of upfront effort and almost continuous maintenance or you can use Webomates CQ.

Partial regression is done basically when a software tester wants to analyze the effects of a bug fix to other areas of that particular part of the application. This is done by running some selective test cases from the test suite, just to make sure that the recent changes have not impacted other functional and verified areas of the code. Read for more : Regression Testing