Full Stack Testing, 2nd Edition

Chapter 3. Automated Functional Testing

Automated testing is the practice of using tools instead of humans to perform user-like actions on an application and verify its expected behavior. Such automated testing does not replace manual testing. Indeed, businesses need to do both manual and automated testing to deliver a high-quality product, and they need a wise strategy to balance them. In a nutshell, the strategy will be to use your manual testing capacity to perform manual exploratory testing to discover new test cases, then automate them to cater to regression testing.

Chapter 2 discussed manual exploratory testing; this chapter’s goal is to teach you to test all layers of web applications effectively using automated functional testing. I’ll introduce a strategy to speed feedback, and show you how to use automation tools and set up frameworks at different application layers. The chapter also has exercises on creating agentic test-authoring workflows using AI coding tools. I’ll end by showing you some antipatterns and how to alleviate them in the early stages. Are you ready? Let’s dive in!

Why Automate Testing?

Automated testing significantly reduces the cost of testing in the long term and gives software teams faster feedback than they would get with manual testing. To show why this is the case, let’s consider a scenario where you only perform manual testing throughout your application development cycle, and see how automated testing compares in the same situation.

Let’s ...