What Is a Test Suite? Guide to Benefits, Types & Automation

What is a Test Suite?

What is a test suite? Basically, it’s the collection of all test cases you have. Well, this sure was a short post, thank you for reading!

Jokes aside, yes, a test suite is the set of all your tests. But there’s much more to it than just this simple definition, as you’ll see in this post. Here’s a list of what we’ll cover:

• a definition of test suite, its benefits, and motivations behind its use
• the types of tests you should add to your test suite
• the relationship between test suite and automation
• how often you should run your test suite during your development process
• the main challenges you might face when building and maintaining your test suite

Test suite: The fundamentals

Let’s begin with some basics, as promised.

What is a test suite?

In the broadest sense, a test suite is a collection of test cases, as you’ve seen in the intro. But a test suite is certainly more than just a bunch of tests.

For starters, the tests in a suite have to be related. It’d make no sense to have a test suite containing one test case for application A, another for application B, maybe two for app C, and so on. What makes sense is for all tests in a test suite to target the same system under test.

Secondly, the test cases must obey some logical organization. After all, you must be able to find test cases when you need them. If you’re adding a new test to the suite, you must know where it goes.

Finally, the tests in your suite should be consistent in their structure and format. That way, you reduce the cognitive load of understanding the test cases, while at the same time making it easier to add more test cases in the future.

With all of that, we can refine our definition of test suite:

A test suite is a collection of test cases that target the same application, are grouped together and organized in a logical way, and follow the same structure, patterns, and conventions.

If you understand and agree that having tests is worth it, it’s obvious that having your tests organized in a clear way and following well-defined conventions is also worth it.

What’s the importance of a test suite?

If you don’t need to be convinced of the importance of software testing, then the importance of having a test suite sort of automatically follows from the definition you’ve just seen. If you understand and agree that having tests is worth it, it’s obvious that having your tests organized in a clear way and following well-defined conventions is also worth it.

What types of tests are typically included in a test suite?

A test suite isn’t restricted to one type of testing. Instead, the types of tests you’ll employ depend on a number of factors. Here’s a nonexhaustive list:

• the type of application you’re testing
• how critical your application is
• the stage your organization is at (e.g., startup vs. scaleup vs. enterprise)
• the technical maturity and qualifications of your employees
• how much you can invest in your overall quality assurance strategy

All of that being said, we can say that most organizations benefit from having test suites with at least the following types of tests:

• unit tests
• integration tests
• end-to-end tests
• API tests

How often should a test suite be run during the development process?

We live in the era of CI/CD, with the most mature teams and organizations deploying to production multiple times a week, even multiple times a day. You simply cannot afford to not test constantly.

So, the only responsible answer to “how often should you run your test suite?” is: as often as possible. Most types of automated tests—particularly unit and integration tests—should be executed at least every time a developer pushes a commit to the main branch. If you use a PR (pull request) based approach, then the creation of every PR should trigger a build and a test run.

For tests that are slower, such as mutation testing, you might consider running them once or twice a day.

Test suites and automation

Let’s now cover how test suites relate to software test automation.

Can a test suite be automated?

Up until now we’ve been using terms like “tests” and “test cases” in a generic way, without explicitly stating whether we’re talking about manual or automated tests—even though we’ve given plenty of hints by talking about CI/CD, pull requests, and the like.

Mind you, it might not be possible to automate 100% of your test suite.
As a consequence, you’d have a hybrid test suite, in which a portion of the test cases is automated and another is not.

But let’s now state it as clearly as possible. Can a test suite be automated? Yes, of course! “In fact, automation has become a necessity for a mature organization in order to scale with the pace of change in today’s complex IT landscape”.

In this day and age, there’s no reason not to invest in software test automation. “In fact, automation has become a necessity for a mature organization in order to scale with the pace of change in today’s complex IT landscape”.

And, by logical consequence, if you have a collection of test cases that are automated, you’ve automated a test suite.

Mind you, it might not be possible to automate 100% of your test suite. As a consequence, you’d have a hybrid test suite, in which a portion of the test cases is automated and another is not.

What is the purpose of an automated test suite?

The purpose behind having an automated test suite is the same behind having automated tests:

• speed and reproducibility when running tests
• catching defects as early as possible
• generating a regression test suite so developers are confident when making changes to the codebase
• if employing unit testing: higher code quality, since use unit testing requires a modular, low-coupled design

Challenges of having a test suite

Building and maintaining a test suite isn’t easy work. It takes time and effort, and you’re sure to find many obstacles along the way. Here’s a non exhaustive list of the main challenges you might face:

• Test data management. Making sure you have high-quality test data, at the right amount, at the right moment for your test cases might be a challenge.
• Test suite maintenance. It’s possible to have a test suite riddled with fragile test cases that break at the minimum change to the code base, thus making maintenance a huge burden.
• Execution time. As your suite grows along your projects, it might become slower and slower to run. Keeping your suite running as fast as possible can be a significant engineering challenge.
• Test environment consistency. You have to make sure your environments are consistent when it comes to data, configurations, versions of the application deployed, and so on.
• Comprehensive coverage. Just having tests within your test suite isn’t enough to ensure quality. It’s also crucial that your suite covers a comprehensive portion of your system.

Conclusion

If, during your software testing learning journey, you feel overwhelmed or tired, I don’t blame you. Software testing is a gigantic field, and there seems to be no end to the number of tools, topics, and concepts to learn. To make your path a bit easier, in this post we brought you a guide to yet another test-related term: test suite.

As you’ve seen, there’s nothing too complicated about the concept of a test suite: it’s an organized collection for your test cases. But during this guide, we’ve also had the opportunity to highlight some of the benefits and challenges of test automation in general.

Now you not only understand this specific term (“test suite”), you’ve also increased your knowledge when it comes to software test automation in general.

Thanks for reading.

This post was written by Carlos Schults. Carlos is a skilled software engineer and an accomplished technical writer for various clients. His passion is to get to the bottom (the original source) of things and captivate readers with approachable and informative technical content.