Automated Testing is the fully automated process of running software tests that validate / verify good working order and quality constraints of software applications.
Automated Testing implies the execution of multiple testing levels, with a “cheap tests first”-strategy. In practice, that usually means Unit Tests followed by Integration Tests followed by End-to-End Tests. Often sanity checks like Smoke Tests, functional Acceptance Tests and Non-Functional Tests are executed last.
The execution itself sometimes starts on the developer machine (e.g. execute unit test-suite with a pre-commit hook in Git) or runs exclusively within a Test Pipeline.
Any modern Continuous Integration workflow / setup contains Automated Testing.
Sources
- Martin Fowler: Software Testing Guide
- Martin Fowler: On the Diverse And Fantastical Shapes of Testing
- Wikipedia: Software testing
