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Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET)

SDET is a combination of a developer as well as a QA specialist who has experience in project management, interacts with the development team, takes part in product development, in writing application code, understands the end user requirements for software, knows how to code and create automation tools testing. Boosty Labs is the largest blockchain development outsourcing company in Europe. Its world-class fintech and cloud engineering team with a solid background of practice that combines consulting, strategy, design and engineering at scale, can help with providing services of a Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET) with a deep expertise in testing methodologies.
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Test Automation Criteria

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Work on the project will last for at least six months

If the development of the project is designed for six months or more, most often during this time the team accumulates some base of stable and unchanged functionality, the testing of which can be automated.

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Availability of long regression tests

If repeated checks (regression tests) take 3-4 days or more, then autotests will help speed up this process due to parallel launch, nightly runs and automatic report generation.

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A large number of bugs are revealed in the late stages of testing

The introduction of automation will not solve this kind of problem 100%, since a lot depends on the project and the processes on it. However, in this case, autotests have a significant advantage – they can be run at any time, including at the development stage. This will allow you to identify possible problems and errors before the task is transferred to testing.

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Test cases require generating a lot of test data or filling out large forms

In this case, test automation will solve the problem of the human factor. AutoTest performs the same sequence of steps each time and tests the same expected result. In addition, filling in and generating data in automatic mode is many times faster than in manual mode.

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Test cases mostly test functional behavior, not interface and usability

Test automation can bring positive results when testing functionality, while visual testing is more effective when done manually.

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If there are problems with performance and/or stability of the systems

Testing the operation of an application or individual services using thousands of concurrent users manually is very difficult or even impossible. Automated scripts running on thousands of threads will create the conditions necessary to assess the health and performance of the application.

The most common goals of test automation are

Reducing time-to-market

Reducing the time from setting a task to releasing an application to production. SDET specialists help reduce the time it takes to test established application functionality. Instead of going through regression cases by hand, they are automated. Running autotests takes several times less time than manual work. In addition, it can be scheduled overnight and run in multiple threads, depending on your hardware resources.

Improving product quality and optimizing testing costs

By automating regression cases, there is no need to hire manual testing specialists to go through an ever-increasing regression on a developing project.

Conduct load testing and performance studies

Automation allows you to emulate the actions of a real user in the system in the right amount and the right type to conduct load studies. This allows you to simulate various situations of increased load on the system and predict its behavior in such situations.

Test automation specialists (SDET, that is, Software Development Engineer in Test) help speed up testing, which means faster release of fresh releases of an IT product. Typically, this is most needed in large scale applications with many business functions.

When working with large-scale IT solutions, for example, remote banking systems (RBS), it is important to constantly test not only the operation of individual functionalities, but also their interaction. Under the tight deadlines, when the leading banks update their applications every month, it is impossible to check everything manually – at least there will not be enough time for this.

When creating IT products for business, two approaches are usually combined:

  • carry out checks manually, with the help of quality assurance (QA) specialists;
  • combine manual testing and automation of individual test cases, smoke and regression tests.

As a rule, SDET experts are involved in the following tasks:

  • Automation of routine and frequent checks, reducing the burden on QA specialists.
  • Control the main functions of the application and track changes in the product.
  • The ability to test with a large number of mobile devices, browser versions and operating systems.
  • Application performance testing in conditions of simultaneous work with a large amount of data and users.

Before proceeding directly to automation, you should analyze the conditions in which you have to work and clarify whether the necessary resources are ready to start it:

Timing

Practice shows that the costs of SDET begin to pay off on average six months after the start. Therefore, clarifying the scope of the long-term project is one of the key factors in deciding whether to automate testing.

Team

You should find out what the composition of the SDET team will be. There are two options:

  • the customer already has their own test automation specialists and they just need extra hands. Here there is an option to connect to an already existing “gain” team.
  • the customer starts automation “from scratch” without their own specialists in this field. In this case, the working conditions appear to be completely different than in the first variant.

Stands

It is necessary to immediately decide whether the CI/CD process is built on the project, who will set up the testing environment (SDET or DevOps), test benches and team members have access to them.

Before starting the process of developing a test framework, you need to decide on the technologies and languages ​​​​used.

It is necessary to analyze the project and, depending on its features and requirements for automation, choose the most optimal stack. At the same time, it is necessary to take into account the skill of the specialists who will support and develop the automation project with this stack.

During the implementation of the project, automation efficiency metrics can be collected in order to subsequently analyze them and calculate the percentage of efficiency.

The collected metrics can be divided into two key groups:

  • The number of hours spent by QA to complete the test case.
  • The number of hours spent by SDET on automating (updating) the test case.

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