Digitisation has led every small or big business to go online; to broaden the business horizon, reach every corner of the world and have an online presence. It is imperative to check the viability of a website’s functioning across various platforms like Windows, Mac, IOS or Android, and more to have a seamless user experience.
A site’s seamless working irrespective of the browser and the underlying operating system determines the site's compatibility and functionality. It would ensure that user experience is uninterrupted across all browsers. Thus, it becomes evident that a website needs to undergo a series of tests like the look and feel, button actions, link clicks, image rendering, video streaming and more to function similarly on all browsers. The advancement in the field of testing has revolutionised the usage of tools to perform cross-browser testing.
Let’s talk about a tester with say 15 years of experience. Decades ago, he was performing cross-browser testing manually. Like any other testing checks, cross-browser testing was also checked manually by a tester for each and every functionality that a site offers.
Manual checks are time-consuming and the repetitive execution not only made this technique tiresome but also induced loss of interest. To get away with the tiresome, repetitive work, the testing community moved to automate the test scenarios which can be executed over any platform to test the website’s functionality.
Compatibility Checks
A quick checklist that would help to determine the site’s compatibility:
- Common Manual Checks: Listed below are some common manual checks would help understand the site’s behaviour on various browsers before automating the cross browser testing:
- Some HTML tags may not be supported by some browsers
- Some CSS features or attributes may not be supported by some browsers
- Some browser support specific image formats and if not supported the image would not render
- Some plugins not supported by some browsers like Flash on iPhone or Blackberry
- Base Functionality: The base functionality check ensures that all the happy path scenarios are covered and the basic flow of the application is completed without any errors. Let’s understand the same with the following example checks:
- A Login screen with username and password input fields and a login button to trigger login.
- Username and password fields should be enabled to accept user input.
- The menus or sub-menus on screen or links available in header and footer should be clickable and open the links.
- On successful login, user should navigate to the dashboard
- Above checks would ensure that the basic functionality of the login screen is seamlessly working on every browser
- User interface or Design: The user interface or design of the site like layout, Colors, fonts that is the website's look and feel is the same on all the browsers. For example following checks can be done to ensure that the user experience is consistent:
- Fonts on the webpages are same across all the browsers
- Image rendering - images are rendered properly and have same:
- Image size
- Resolution
- Thumbnails
- Video streaming- If the site has videos then the video streaming should be uninterrupted, that is the video should be available and quality of video should be the same across browsers.
- Layout - Every page on the website follows a format and that should be same across browsers:
- Placement of headers and footers
- Header and footer links and orientation
- Page responsiveness: Page load timings across each browser should be same on same network on all the browsers
- Emulators: There are a number of emulators available for various desktop or mobile devices. These emulators can be used to check the website rendering on all browsers.
- Accessibility: In case the website is eligible to be used by differently abled users then verify the user’s accessibility for the functionalities.
- Compare the UI: Comparing the screenshots of the webpages, this can be done manually or by using a tool.
- Test Labs: Set-up an on-premise test lab that would simulate the real time testing
- Cloud based platform: Use a cloud based platform that would enable the real time testing on real browsers across various browsers and operating systems
The industry has a handful of tools to choose from for cross browser testing and performing all these checks. The transformation of deployment from large privately held servers to hosting the website on the cloud has paved the path to simulate the test environment and verify the website on the cloud.
A varied number of cloud based testing tools are available in the market that makes it easy to perform cross browser testing in pre-production or similar to live or live environments without disrupting the actual business functions. Continuous integration has reduced the efforts of moving a build from a test environment to the live environment and testing has perfectly sealed the deal.
Different tools are available in the market for automating cross browser testing. Almost every other tool has a specific format to be used or followed for creating an automated script for cross browser testing. It introduces a new learning curve.
Wouldn’t it have helped to write tests in the natural language like English?
Wondering if there is a tool available?
Yes, Testsigma offers you to write your test cases in natural language, get away from tirelessly writing java code or javascript handles to perform cross browser testing. Get away with verifying the Firefox developers tool to get the hang of those element ids and based them on n number of scenarios and complex conditions. Testsigma would let you focus on the quality of test cases rather than focusing on writing the test cases in the desired format.
The five key features provided by Testsigma that would make your life easy and make your job effective are:
- Write automated tests in simple English (Click here to know more)
- Cloud based test lab that supports parallel execution
- One platform that supports visual and functional testing
- With more than 2000+ real desktop and device simulation
- Easy integration into your Jenkins continuous Delivery Pipeline
An easy, quick and effective automated cross browser testing tool that would add quality and faster delivery to your product or services. Signup for Free.
To get all the benefits out of test automation, you need to have a right test automation framework in place.
Selecting a wrong one may lead to waste of your time and money.
Since each and every project is unique, the requirements, duration, and tool choice will vary.
That's why your primary goal is to select an automation framework that leads to smarter testing, productivity benefits, and better overall results in your particular project.So what should you consider to make the right choice?Our quality assurance team asks this question each and every time they start working on a new project.
To save our time, we’ve worked out a step-by-step checklist that guides our test automation framework choices.
Now we are sharing it with you.
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Compatibility testing: Software must run in different computing environments, so this checks compatibility with different systems.
In this article, we outline how can small QA teams make the transition from manual to codeless testing to full-fledged automated testing.
For example, a script to import test data into a database, a utility to generate random test data, etc.2 – Know impediments to switching to automated testingOnce you acknowledge as a team that you need to move to automated testing, the next step is to know what is stopping your team from making this move.
For example, think before picking a tool that does not work well with iFrames if your application is using iFrames heavily, or start to build out a test automation framework if your team doesn’t have any automation experience, etc.3 – Start simple and small but make it successfulA good beginning is half the job done.
Don’t go crazy with automation and start with most time taking or complex ones first or you will make your beginning harder and reduce your chances of success.
It will be easier when you choose a combination of tools and frameworks.
Codeless testing tools could cover most of your simple to medium complex manual tests.5 – Learn and practice programmingPick up the programming language that your team is most comfortable with.
As we are moving towards rapid development cycles and quicker deliveries to market, driven through agile methodology, performing manual testing seems time-consuming, repetitive and prone to human errors.
The requirement to implement automation testing from scratch seems to fit in the business owing to its flexibility of greater coverage to functionalities with lesser time to market and early discovery of issues as compared to manual tests.
I am going to highlight some key notes for you to keep in mind as you plan to start automation testing from scratch.Why We Hesitate While Switching From Manual To Automation Testing?Automation testing is considered a widely used parameter to overcome the manual testing issues and probably trying to rule it out to the max.
The few challenges one would face are:Too Preoccupied With Upcoming Release Activities: We are too busy writing effective manual test cases, devising test strategy due to back to back planned up releases that we forget to plan a time window for developing automation test scripts.The complexity, time and resources: Any new process comes with time and learning new areas and methods.
Taking the right decision at the right time is more important for better quality achievement and ROI.
This helps to save time for teams by analyzing whether the build needs in-depth testing or not post the automation suite results.Data-driven testing: Functionalities that required to be tested with multiple sets of data.Cross-browser testing: This is one of the bigger issues that arise when it comes to supporting application on multiple browsers and versions or if refer to responsive testing for validating the website’s RWD(Responsive Web Design).
