Automated testing is the application of software tools to automate a human-driven manual process of reviewing and validating a software product. The test plans are developed alongside regular roadmap feature development then executed automatically by software continuous integration tools.

As most people in the software industry know, there are distinct differences between manual testing and automated testing. Manual testing requires physical time and effort to ensure the software code does everything it’s supposed to do. In addition, manual testers have to make a record of their findings. This involves checking log files, external services and the database for errors. If you’re familiar with manual testing, you know this process can be extremely time-consuming and repetitive.

The fundamental difference between manual and automated testing is straightforward. With manual testing, a human is responsible for single-handedly testing the functionality of the software in the way a user would. Automated testing is done through an automation tool, so more time can be spent on higher value tasks, such as exploratory tests while automating time-consuming tests, such as regression tests.  While you do need spend time maintaining test scripts overall, you will increase your test coverage and scalability.

The move to agile has led many teams to adopt a pyramid testing strategy. The test automation pyramid strategy calls for automating tests at three different levels. Unit testing represents the base and biggest percentage of this test automation pyramid. Next comes, service layer, or API testing. Integrated GUI and API testing solutions like TestComplete can make the process of implementing a test automation pyramid easier as it ensures changes made to the API test cases are automatically reflected at the GUI level as well.