Simplify your Work from Home Challenges with Test Automation Tool Testsigma

One day suddenly the whole world locked down to prevent the pandemic from being spread uncontrollably. When machines and factories were all stopped – your social media, mobile applications, and all the digital world was still operating at the same pace as before.

Even if you did not notice, millions of developers and testers worked from their homes to keep you online and help you share your thoughts, purchase essential supplies and view live news.

What started as a necessity has now become a new normal in the information technology industry. More than 55% of industries have now been permitted to work from home even when the pandemic is over.

Maintaining the same efficiency as the in-office setup is not possible if you are indulged in a complicated connection of multiple tool – you would need a good tool that not only supports but facilitates the work no matter what location you are working from.

In this post, we will discuss one such tool along with a few points that make our remote life easy. How the tool manages in these situations, is the crux of our post.

For simplicity, I have divided this post into two different sections – technical and management – how Testsigma, a completely cloud-based test automation tool, supports team members in both these domains while they work from home. Both of these sections focus on their respective expert areas with respect to Testsigma.

Technical capabilities

This section describes the technical capabilities of the tool Testsigma, for software test automation, that help the team execute tests smoothly.

Cloud-based infrastructure

The first requirement for working from home efficiently is to use a tool that is available over the cloud network. Testsigma checked this point even before the pandemic arrived.

Cloud-based systems provide a two-fold advantage to the team. Firstly, it is available anywhere and everywhere you want it. You can sit in India or the United States or use my PC or your friend’s, you just have to log in and all your work will be visible to you right away.

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Secondly, cloud-based systems do not eat up your personal resources that can have a huge impact on test execution. Consider you are running test scripts on one application while writing test scripts in another framework on a 4GB system.

This can slow down the process and delay the test results. Since you are working from home, there is no other system to share the load also – Testsigma, a completely cloud-based test automation tool, lets you use your own resources for other works while providing their own powerful infrastructure to assign machines and run tests on them. As far as your personal system is concerned, an internet connection and a browser are all you want.

Scalable

A project, no matter how much potential it has, always start small, slow, and then eventually scales up with time. But even if you have a small team working remotely, scalability is always kept in mind for the future.

If you are at a point where you are scaling constantly but the tools you are using have given up on you, the whole project can face a downtime which is bad for business and reputation.

Testsigma comes with scalability features for all types of teams – an individual, a team, or a complete organization. Testsigma works on the cloud infrastructure and therefore if you have a requirement to scale up your testing, you can do that just by clicking a couple of buttons with the comfort of sitting at home.

This way you not only save a lot of time but you pay only for the number of resources you use and hence speed up the delivery.

English based scripting using NLP

Your legacy test code may be written in a programming language that your testers may or may not know. The same situation comes for frameworks that support only a couple of languages.  To make changes to that code and write test scripts of their own the testers have to learn that supported programming language and then understand the legacy code.

This problem can be faced either remotely or in-office. But what happens in such a scenario is that when people try to understand the code, they face a lot of problems in either understanding the logic or the flow of the execution.

Resolving this issue in the office is easy. You just have to go to the tester/developer’s desk or someone who has already worked on it and get a bit of knowledge transfer or support from them. The work is done.

In a remote office setup, the only option is to either call or chat through your preferred application. This can be a lot of pain as people are busy and as a result, the process can extend to multiple days.

Testsigma offers a straightforward and simple solution to this. The tool comes equipped with artificial intelligence and natural language processing capabilities. In simple words, it lets you do the simple work and perform the harder job by itself by asking you to write the scripts in plain English language.

The following image demonstrates a test script written to navigate to a particular website:

So when a new person looks at your legacy code, it is just like reading English sentences (refer to the above image). The process of completing the testing then becomes faster even while sitting at home.

Integration with tools

Software integrations need no introduction to the people working in the software industry. There is no perfect tool that has everything in-built into it. We have an awesome bug tracking software while another awesome cross-browser testing device lab etc. A good tool is one that can join all the integrations and provide you with convenience on a single screen. 

Testsigma takes care of all the necessary integrations that the testers can use from the platform and make use of it as required. 

You can also find the most important aspect of testing – integration with CI/CD tools for smooth build and test phases on each version. You can visit the integrations page to know more about the integrations that you may require.

Support for multiple testing methods

Software testing is a big umbrella that contains a lot of sub-testing processes that ensure that the released software is of top quality. These may include regression testing, automation testing, mobile app testing, cross-browser testing, etc.

For all these things to work remotely, you might have to go for one framework that can do data-driven testing, another for automation, etc. 

Testsigma brings every sub-testing process onto a single platform giving the freedom to the tester of choosing anyone or using all of them as per the requirements. With Testsigma, you don’t have to switch to various frameworks and learn each of them.

The tool provides robust data-driven testing, regression testing, cross-browser testing, automation testing, and much more for the teams. While working remotely, if you are learning just a single software for all your needs, you can speed up the cycles.

Management capabilities

This section describes the management capabilities of the tool that play an equal role in increasing efficiency and productivity while working remotely.

24×7 Support

The most important part of working remotely as described in the NLP section above is the need to understand the framework or tool you are working on.

If you are stuck anywhere, you just have two options – either google it, find the solution and try if it works or you can ask anyone from your team who has already worked on the framework before. While working remotely, both of these options have a high probability of failure as you are not physically present to ask anyone.

Testsigma understands that while working remotely, you may face a problem that needs to be solved urgently whether it is day or night. Therefore, the tool comes with 24-hour support every day so that your work never suffers at any time and you have someone to clear your queries from.

Collaborative editing

Collaborative editing is a process combining two terms – collaboration and editing. Collaboration means you have a platform that can facilitate sharing the documents, progress, reports etc.

If I am done with a testing process, maybe I can send my reports from the same platform or it gets shared automatically to the team etc. In simple words, even if we are remote, the team gets an organized set of documents at their disposal. Collaborative editing is however a bit different than just collaboration. 

For example, Google docs allows collaborative editing in which instead of sharing a copy of the document, we share the link to the same document with another person. The receiver can then edit the same document and I can see the changes.

This is an important feature to look for while working remotely because it can get really messy if we start sharing multiple documents to the complete team and then look at the changes by each of them. It can become a small GitHub of our own but more complicated than that.

Testsigma, a completely cloud-based test automation tool, provides collaborative editing to its testers for not only sharing the test cases with the team but they can also provide their suggestions on the same test case while working from the comforts of their homes.

This way, the whole team can see the changes on a single document and there is no complications or confusion to address.

Role-based responsibilities

In-office setups often work in different environments and are controlled by either credentials or access roles assigned in the backend that can restrict unauthorized access. When we are working remotely using a tool, this becomes a problem as now you are connecting to the tool’s server rather than using your own.

Consider a scenario where you are two team members working on the same project and hence share all the files. But, since your teammate is in a senior position, he has access to deleting a file that you don’t. He can also create a new task for you or himself. If in any way, you can also do the same action as he does, it becomes a security loophole especially when contract employees are on board. 

Testsigma comes with the user access levels to predefine who has access to what in the tool. You can also create custom roles and define access to them as per your requirements. While working from home, this becomes very helpful as you don’t have to create another layer through yourself when the tool covers everything for you.

Conclusion

 Working from home has become a new normal in the IT industry. Not only it has become convenient but more than 75% of employees find it more productive than in-office work. It seems like working from home will continue for some time now and for IT, it is not easy. 

The remote setup leaves us with the only option of using chat or calls to connect with someone and resolve our queries. Using multiple tools for multiple purposes just increases the query count a lot more which then results in the delay of work, projects, and fewer test cycles as before.

The need of the hour is a tool that is complete in itself and can provide you with the functionalities of all the individual tools in a single place. Testsigma fits perfectly in such a scenario providing the tester with a platform that can help in automation, cross-browser testing, regression testing, and many more types.

Testsigma is a completely cloud-based test automation tool built on a robust infrastructure providing a clean interface and centralized testing experience to the organization, meanwhile, enhancing the work from home experience too.

Testsigma presents a unique style of writing the tests in the English language that helps in easy test creation. All these features help testers in work from home setup as learning becomes very easy and with 24-hour support, one dedicated person is always there for you. With Testsigma, you just have to focus on testing and the rest is taken care of by the tool.

We tried our best to highlight how the test automation tool Testsigma can smoothen out your work from home. However, if you would like to query anything else about the tool, feel free to contact our support.