What are the benefits of creating multiple actions within any virtual user script?

It is one of the most frustrating things when your software system or application crashes once the whole software development life cycle or SDLC is over while the user tries to install it. 

You can just make out what impression it will have of your work and efforts on the user!

- Time wasted!

- Reputation spoiled!

- No benefits!

Nowadays to avoid such kind of situations and inconvenience to the users, a standard procedure of QA (quality assurance) has been defined to test the software systems and applications. 

In previous years, the task of software testing was thought to be an ultimate drudgery but now it has all been eased with the help of automated testing tools and one of them being the VU or virtual user. 

In this article we shall discuss about virtual user as well as the benefits one can have of creating multiple actions within any virtual user script. 

What is Virtual User?

- Emulating a real world human user becomes such an easy task with the help of virtual user which otherwise will take up a lot of time.

- A virtual user can almost perform most of the actions that are performed by a human user like:

1. Clicking the mouse
2. Hovering or pointing the mouse over some object on the screen.
3. Typing the words and commands.
4. Selecting some object.

- The system on which the virtual user software package is installed acts as the host computer and one more computer is paired with this one called the target system. 

- The responsibility of the host system is to control the other computers present in the network while the target computer is programmed to receive the instructions from the host computer. 

- In the environment of the virtual user, the software system or application takes up the task of compiling and running the scripts called virtual user scripts.

Benefits of creating multiple actions with virtual user script

Now coming to the benefits of creating multiple actions within a virtual user script:

1. Creating multiple actions within a VU script becomes quite effective when employed in tests that are highly repetitive and consist of many variations.
2. With the multiple action feature, more and more tasks can be performed which otherwise would be quite a tedious job to do for the human users. But for a system it is possible since it does not bother itself with tiredness, tediousness and thus proving itself as an ideal tester.
3. Another benefit of the multiple actions in one virtual user script is that such tests can be created which can be run at almost every internal build of the software system or application under question in the stages like:

a)   Development stage

b)   Alpha stage

c)   Beta stage

d)   Final release stage

4. With a virtual user script with multiple actions it can be easily verified that no functionality was broken by the code changes that were made to the earlier version of the software system or application.
5. With the help of multiple actions containing virtual user scripts, an automatic bug verification mechanism can be set up by imitating the steps through which a bug can be reproduced.
6. The automatic big verification test thus developed can be used to test each and every release of the software system or application thus ensuring that the bug has been fixed and there are no chances of it sneaking back in to the program code.
7. These multiple actions scripts can be split in to single ones whenever required.