Regression Testing Services for Teams

Software development is a field that never stands still; whether it is new features, bug fixes, or performance improvements, whatever code you change has the potential to break the software functionality that currently exists.

To combat the risk of accentuating existing software functionality when making changes during software development cycles, companies often employ Software Regression Testing Services. Regression testing is a very specific service, which addresses the reliability and integrity of software throughout ongoing periods of continuous development.

This blog discusses the important aspects of regression testing services, its benefits, challenges, how we can achieve marginal gains through the use of tools like Keploy and how companies can identify the right service partner.

What Are Software Regression Testing Services?

Software regression testing services are third-party testing services that seek to confirm recent changes to application code do not negatively affect the application's existing functionality. Regression testing services typically come from dedicated professional QA vendors, consultants, or testing tools, and are indispensable to organizations with little or no capacity for in-house testing.

These often include:

• Design and maintenance of regression test cases

• Test execution automation

• CI/CD pipeline integration

• Defect reporting and defect tracking

• Simulated end-user environments

  Unlike one-off or in-house testing efforts, these services offer dedicated resources and professional experience to develop durable, reusable, and scalable regression test suites.

Why Businesses Need Regression Testing Services

The interest in software regression testing services is increasing for many reasons:

• Faster Releases: Agile development practices and DevOps require organizations to release quickly and in a more frequent manner. Regression testing services provide a level of assurance that each release can maintain stability of previously working features.

• Scalability: With organizational growth comes applications with a growing footprint. As a result, human testing becomes burdensome. Regression testing services develop automation, which minimizes human intervention.

  

• Quality Assurance: A dedicated regression testing service can usually identify "edge-case" bugs that internal teams usually never find.

• Resource Optimization : Regression testing services allows internal teams to work without spending time and resources on quality assurance, and continue to focus on core product planning and development.

• Minimize Downtime: The longer you wait to catch regressions, the height that risks of deploying buggy software to production. Jam together a regression testing plan, build it into a faster release cadence, and have your service assist in your release cadence and commitment at all levels in perpetuity.

Benefits of Regression Testing Services

Choosing a dedicated regression testing service provides a wide range of benefits:

• Expertise: Access to skilled professionals who have tested using the framework specific to your domain.

• Efficiency: Reduced timeframes to complete testing and release new updates.

• Test Coverage: Wider and deeper coverage provided by both automated and manual methods.

• Risk Management: Finding defects upfront greatly reduces the chance of production failure.

• Focus: Internal teams can focus on development and innovation, instead of maintenance testing.

• Custom Solution: Services can be crafted for the unique needs of each project.

Manual vs. Automated Regression Testing

In manual regression testing, testers manually run test cases, which can be time-consuming and susceptible to mistakes. In automated regression testing, testers utilize tools and scripts or programming to automatically run test cases over and over, after the software has changed.

The advantages of automated testing include:

• Quicker Execution: The automated testing capabilities execute in parallel in various environments, so it can run much quicker.

• Reusable Work: Once you have setup the automated test cases, you can use the same tested cases again for future builds, it saves you time and work later.

• Cost Savings: While it might require an initial investment, automation ultimately reduces the ongoing costs involved in testing.

• Seamless CI/CD Integration: Automated regression tests fit well with continuous integration and deployment pipelines, making it easier to catch issues early in the development cycle.

Key Components of Software Regression Testing Services

1. Functional Regression Testing:

   Tests to validate that once a change has been made that the individual functional units retain their integrity.

2. System Integration Regression Testing:
   Tests to validate that all modules and services in the application have a valid expected and documented behavior in a production simulating environment.

3. End-to-End Regression Testing:
   Tests to validate a simulated end user's journey, capturing their interaction with and hash checks against I/O to verify workflow.

4. Data-Driven Testing:
   Tests the application's behavior under various input conditions, including when supplied with dynamic datasets.

5. Performance Regression Testing:
   Tests any performance regressions following deployment.

6. Automated Test Suite Management:

   The creation, scheduling and maintenance of an automated test suite.

Regression Testing Challenges and Solutions

Challenges and Solutions:

1. Increased Test Suite Size:
   As the software grows, the regression test suite can grow to be unmanageable in size, and execution times increase.
   Solution:

   • Implement test case prioritization to run the tests with the highest risk first.

   • Make use of test suite optimization.

2. High Maintenance Effort:
   When an application is changing frequently, maintaining the test scripts is overhead - the applications may be evolving, but the regression tests will remain the same.

   Solution:

   • Provide modular and reusable scripts when you are designing tests.

   • Use either keyword-driven testing or data-driven testing.

3. Flaky Tests:
   Flaky tests that pass or fail intermittently can create false positive or false negative results which decreases confidence in the validity of the test run's results.

   Solution:

   • Determine the causes of flakiness and fix the root causes (unstable locators, timing issues, etc.).

   • Look for stable locators and integrate wait strategies to allow the application to settle.

4. Resource Constraints:
   With manual regression testing, there is a huge amount of human effort that is required, as well as time, which doesn't allow for short cycles.

   Solution:

   • Use tools for test automation.

   • Utilize a continuous integration and delivery pipeline for regression tests to gain continuous feedback.

5. Limited Test Coverage:
   In a fast pace environment, it is hard to get thorough coverage on all scenarios, so there is an accompanying risk that critical defects are missed.

   Solution:

   • Use risk-based testing to identify the most critical scenarios for coverage.

   • Continuous inspection and updating of test cases to reflect changes to requirements.

How Often Should Regression Testing Be Performed

Compared to more traditional models of software development, it is more common to do regression testing more frequently in agile and DevOps models, for example:

• After every code change. Even a small change can break existing functionality.

• Before every release of the software. You want to be confident that newer updates do not affect older features.

• During continuous integration. It is better to find bugs early in the development pipeline rather than late when resources have been exhausted.

• As related to bug fixes. When a bug is fixed, you should consider that it may affect other functionality in the system.

• Testing frequently consistently is the best way to ensure high quality software and limiting production risk.

How Do You Improve Regression Testing?

• Automate the boring stuff

• Make sure your test cases are always new and useful

• Add tests to your CI/CD pipeline

• Use version control to keep track of things

• Keep an eye on things like test time, pass rates, and defects

• Encourage developers and testers to collaborate

Main differences between manual regression testing and automated regression testing:

Choosing the Right Regression Testing Partner

Before partnering with a third-party regression testing provider, review them based on:

• Tooling and Automation Capability: Make sure they use a modern set of tools while employing an automation framework.

• Domain Knowledge: While some level of knowledge is good, a regression testing company in your industry will give you more relevant and deeper testing.

• Scalability: Understand how the company would scale their efforts against enterprise volumes and complexity.

• Integrations Support: Making sure it fits into your existing DevOps stack is a must.

• Reporting & Analytics: You want to receive transparent actionable reports on your teams' efficacy.

How do you use Keploy for Regression Testing?

• Test Case Management: Keploy does the heavy lifting in terms of test case management. You can label test cases by purpose, severity or functionality to make regression tests easy to find and execute.

• Test Automation: Keploy allows you to utilize automatic testing tools and frameworks such as GoTest, JUnit, NUnit, etc. You will be able to run regression test suites automatically after any change to the code base.

• Continuous Integration (CI): Keploy can incorporate with CI pipelines such as Jenkins, Travis CI and CircleCI. You can configure Keploy to automatically run regression tests after each code commit in any repository, and it does this in your fully automated CI pipeline.

• Capture and Replay Tests: Keploy gives you the ability to capture and replay tests and mocks that simulate actual traffic. As part of a regression testing strategy this capability enables you to replay user interaction and conditions you wish to test, to find regressions introduced after a code change.

• Code Coverage Analysis: Keploy comes with built-in code coverage analysis tools or supports existing code coverage tools for automated regression testing such as line coverage, branch coverage and statement coverage. If you collect code coverage metrics while running regression tests, you will be able to ensure all applicable code paths were executed and any regression bugs discovered.

Benefits of using regression testing with Keploy:

• It supports the assurance that the software is stable and dependable.

• It assists in preventing regressions, bugs that are added to software as changes are made.

• It helps to allow failures to happen in the software prior to exposing it to users.

• It helps save time and resources by not having to correct regressions after exposing software to end users.

Keploy facilitates regression testing through automated recording of real user API calls and converting them into test cases. When you make changes to your application (for example, when you release a new version), you can use Keploy to re-run or replay all of the recorded API interactions against the updated app. Keploy then compares the current responses to the responses that were previously captured to find any unintended changes or regressions. Keploy support for regression testing in these key areas:

• It captures and replays real API traffic, ensuring your tests reflect actual user scenarios.

• Keploy automatically mocks dependencies, so you don’t need to set up complex test environments for regression runs.

• With self-healing tests, Keploy can auto-update minor changes in API responses, reducing maintenance overhead.

• The flaky test detection feature validates your test results over multiple runs to ensure reliability.

• Keploy generates detailed reports highlighting any differences between expected and actual API responses, making it easy to spot regressions.

This approach increases test coverage, reduces manual effort, and ensures that new changes do not break existing functionality, making regression testing faster and more reliable.​

Conclusion

In today’s software development environment, where iterations happen in a more agile fashion, Software Regression Testing Services play a key role in providing the ability to continually deliver stable, defect free software product.

Software Regression Testing Services will provide businesses access to tools, knowledge and scalability to help them test smarter and faster, especially when coupled with a platform like Keploy. When businesses invest in the services provided for regression testing at scale, they can protect user experience, build customer confidence, and lower the cost of fixing defects after deployment.

Related Blogs

1. Regression Testing: An Introductory Guide

2. Unit Testing vs Regression Testing: A Comprehensive Guide

3. Smoke Testing vs Regression Testing: What You Need To Know

4. Diverse Test Data: Boosting Regression Testing Efficiency

5. Cross Browser Testing: A Complete Guide

FAQs

1. What is the difference between regression testing and retesting?

Regression testing looks for new defects in functional areas that already existed. Retesting is accomplished to confirm certain bugs have been fixed.

2. How often should regression testing be done?

Ideally, with every build or code change, particularly in CI/CD scenarios.

3. Can regression testing be 100% automated?

Most of it can be automated! There are always always will be outlying edge cases that will likely involve some degree of manual verification.

4. Which types of applications benefit the most from regression testing services?

Applications which are changing frequently, complex user workflows, multiple integrations and interactions with other systems (particularly due to compliance) all benefit from regression testing services.

5. Are regression testing services a good fit for only large enterprise customers and not startups?

Regression testing services can scale to give cost effective engagement and can be tailored to fit a start-up or the large enterprise. Start-ups frequently receive the benefits of recent expert quality assurance without having to build a QA team themselves.

6. How will regression testing services keep the test cases relevant over time?

Typically we continually manage and maintain test suite we routinely retire test cases to keep the suite current over time while new test cases will be added as the features change.