The use of WebRTC is growing at a phenomenal pace and development of WebRTC based products and applications is at an all time high. In this blog we explore the importance and benefits of WebRTC test automation during the R&D phase of a product life cycle.
Every organization developing a WebRTC based application should have testing in place as part of their product development roadmap. Just like it’s important to have tests in place, it also matters how we run those tests.
Some organizations prefer to do manual testing, although that may not be the best approach. Manual testing is time consuming, more costly and provides limited test coverage and insights. If an organization has manual testing in place, the next logical step is to automate the testing process. Test automation increases overall software development efficiency and allows for the creation of more robust tools.
Let’s take a closer look at the benefits of automated WebRTC testing;
1 – Faster Feedback Cycle
As mentioned, manual testing is time consuming and feedback for newly developed features can be slow. Automated testing helps to increase the speed of iteration loop and reduce the feedback cycle to bring faster validation for phases in the development of a product.
2 – Team Saves Time
By automating the testing process, the development team spends less time validating newly developed features. It also improves communication with other departments like QA, support, or product owners who rely on the results of these tests. With automated testing these departments have the insights and information available to them through consistent test results which are easily accessible.
3 – Reduced Business Expenses
When using an automated test environment, a business will reduce R&D costs as fewer resources are spent on testing the product. Over the course of a whole project, this can make a big difference.
Test automation is especially useful because it helps detect problems or bugs early on during the development phase, which increases the team’s efficiency and reduces cost.
4 – Higher Test Coverage
Manual testing puts limits on test verification. Automation allows for time to be spent writing new tests and adding them to an automated test suite. This increases the test coverage for the product, so more features are properly tested, resulting in a higher quality application.
Also, automated testing allows developers to write more in-depth tests for complex use cases. Lengthy tests that are too resource-intensive for manual testing can run unattended.
5 – Reusability of Test Suite
Once a development team has a defined suite of tests it’s very straightforward to reuse tests for newly developed features, other use cases or even other projects. The advantage is that another project can easily connect to the automated test suite which is a huge resource saving.
6 – Faster time to market
As mentioned, newly developed features can be continuously tested and validated with WebRTC test automation. This reduces the feedback and testing cycle and allows companies to bring their products to the market faster.
7 – Better insights
Automated testing provides better insights than manual testing when some tests fail. Test automation not only gives insights into the application but also shows you the media statistics, ICE negotiation state machines and API events log. It can do so visually, making it easier to track and understand the results. This helps developers determine what’s gone wrong.
8 – WebRTC test automation provides more features
An automated test suite can help test more features. For example, when a service needs to grow, whether it’s to 10 users in the same session, 40 people across 20 1:1 sessions or thousands of users interacting with an application – virtual users are necessary in order to see how the application behaves – this would be impossible to test manually. Features like this save developers a lot of time!
9 – Less stress on QA team
By implementing an automated testing strategy, the QA team can spend time on tasks other than manual testing. For many QA engineers, test automation creates the opportunity to build new tools to further optimize the current testing suite or extend it with new features.
10 – Improved accuracy
It would take a great deal of time and effort to replicate tests manually. Especially when testing a complex use case, faults can occur. WebRTC test automation can execute tests with 100-percent accuracy as they produce the same result every time you run them.
About us
testRTC is a toolset, powered by Spearline, that enables testing, monitoring and support for WebRTC based applications and services.
testingRTC is a browser automation tool focused on your WebRTC testing needs. By automating web browsers, you can simulate real users using your service from different locations around the world, running on different network configurations, all done at scale in a reproducible fashion – so you can test, debug, validate and optimize your application efficiently. testingRTC is part of our complete suite of quality assurance solutions.