As we round the bend into 2025, here’s our best advice for maximizing your automation testing productivity and avoiding mistakes. Automated testing entails much more than simply creating tests and enabling them. A “set it and forget it” approach won’t get you very far with automated tests — particularly automated browser tests, which interact with the ever-changing frontend of your application or website.

When it comes to developing and building websites and web applications, a certain amount of technical debt is expected. In fact, some even argue that it can be a good thing if used strategically. Still, it’s important to stay on top of tech debt before it can overwhelm your business and cause problems that have long-term consequences. Too much technical debt can throw a wrench in business operations and slow down development, stealing hours of valuable time from your dev team.

Consider the following: You go to the Apple Store to pick up the latest iPhone. You get home and turn it on, only to find that the screen is defective, the buttons aren’t working, and every one of the built-in apps is glitching. Thanks to QA tools, this is an extremely unlikely scenario. Before the iPhone reaches your hands, both its hardware and software have been tested repeatedly by a Quality Assurance (QA) team.

Selenium IDE is a popular open-source tool for recording and running automated browser tests. You can use it to interact with a browser the way a human would, doing things like navigating to URLs, filling in forms, and clicking on links and buttons. You can also use “assertions” to verify things are working as expected, like checking that elements are present, text is present, inputs contain certain values, et cetera.

Every QA tester knows: time is money. When something breaks down on your website or web application, it can cause major issues for users within minutes. Because you’re constantly working to prevent fires from spreading (or happening at all), it’s important to have numerous strategies at the ready to help you manage your time wisely. One of these QA testing timesavers is called smoke testing. But exactly what is smoke testing?

Quality Assurance testers play an important role in verifying that company software maintains its functionality and reliability. Because the world of software testing is an expansive one, QA testers should equip themselves with an understanding of which types of software testing are most relevant to their daily tasks. With so many different software testing types, it can be overwhelming knowing where to start.

If you work in Quality Assurance testing, you know that automated browser testing saves every tester from hours upon hours of manual test work. But exactly what is automation testing, and how does it fit into a typical QA workflow? We’ve got the full explanation for you in this straightforward guide on the basics of automation testing, how it can transform your QA process, and how to get started with test automation tools like Ghost Inspector.

End-to-end testing (E2E) is an important part of the software development process, serving as a comprehensive way to verify that applications and systems work properly not only in the testing enviroment, but also in real-life scenarios. It provides a level of assurance that your application will correctly exhibit behavior from start to finish.

You’re testing a user registration page on a website to ensure that new users are able to set up their account easily. You build a test that checks to make sure that users can: Congratulations, you’ve just automated a user acceptance test. But what is user acceptance testing (UAT)? And why is it important for QA testers to understand? In this article, we’ll walk you through everything a QA tester should know about user acceptance testing.

Here’s a scenario: You’re a QA tester building automated tests for a new online email app. One test case requires you to confirm that the email reply button is working correctly. The challenge is that the email thread updates dynamically without changing its web address URL, complicating the process by limiting the effectiveness of using CSS selectors alone. So what else can you do? The answer: It’s time to bring in XPath selectors.