In today’s competitive world, the most important presence for a corporation is their website. It not only acts as a face for the company but also as an interface enabling its clients, users, and prospects to communicate with the company. As websites are accessible to users via thin clients such as web browsers, the quality and reliability of a website are paramount to its success. To ensure this, rigorous testing becomes more of a necessity than a choice. However, the technical complexities of a website and the variety of browsers make testing a challenging proposition. This warrants the need for specific tools and methods to test specific functions.

A typical development cycle consists of multiple iterations with new functionalities being added continuously. Along with the need to test a new functionality, you also need to validate that the functions added earlier still behave the same. This is known as regression testing.

Regression testing in initial iterations is manageable manually. However, as the number of test cases increases, the effort, time and complexity for the testing team increases proportionally.

To understand this, let’s assume the task is to support a website on three browsers – Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Safari on three platforms – Windows, Linux and Macintosh.

If there are N numbers of test cases, then we need to execute 5N number of tests. Imagine when N becomes 500 or more.

To overcome this complexity, automated testing offers a convenient solution and ensures that the code that is being developed or maintained works. It allows testers to execute a set of defined tests within a predictable time period and compare the results accurately.