Test Automation Tactics: Things You Should Know
With the software industry getting more concentrated and attuned towards customer satisfaction than ever before, it has become more crucial for software to become more responsive. Software changes are becoming more frequent by demanding stringent quality parameters which enforces a highly efficient and automated development. For this reason, test automation has seen a huge change in its adoption levels for a few years.
Nothing is more important than having the right framework for successful test automation to ensure success. Let us see what it takes it to build a successful framework for your complete software testing.
1 Hire a Dedicated team
One of the best things you can have for software development success is to have a talented staff which includes professionals along with the smartest graduates from local universities. They can actually help you with guaranteed quality results as you expect.
Flexible staffing allows you to format your team according to business demands and provides you the best solutions by eliminating your recruiting process. This phase is crucial as it provides you with the best people and the best price at the lowest market cost.
2 Metrics Measurement
You cannot define the success of automation by comparing the manual efforts with the automation effort but still, it can capture the metrics such as how much percent of defects are found and what are the improvements required to boost your productivity? Metrics do matter to people as it helps you to justify investments as many people are struggling to figure out why they should invest in a test automation solution and not in manual testing. One should look at the SAP transport impact analysis, defect reduction, and accelerated time to delivery when working with the metrics analysis.
3 Tool Selection
One can go for a complete tailored selection process against your requirements. Imagine what happens when you don't try a logical evaluation of the automated testing tool for your software? Well, it might result in a wrong selection of the tool or a sub-optimal tool as these tools do not really suit all your particular requirements.
The biggest challenge with an automation tester is that it has to tackle the right tool selection procedure. For this, you need to identify your requirements and then start exploring variant tools and their features. A wrong tool selection can lead to loss of licensing fees, time spent and chances of automation.
4 Framework for Automation
Generally, there is a misbelief that if you select the right tool then you can automate anything. A framework is a compilation of automation guidelines in maintaining consistency of the testing and less of code by improving reusability. There are mainly four types of automation in software testing such as data-driven, Keyword-driven, Modular and Hybrid automation framework. You can choose an appropriate one which can help you in making successful automation.
5 Look after your budget costs and process
For any business process, a dedicated budget is crucial which comes with costs related to the testing tools, development, resources, and training. Addition to this, the maintenance cost for automated tests and tools are also included which is a well-defined testing process as it defines the testing coverage. It is expected to be a well-defined quality control procedure and test execution which defines test criteria at each stage.
6 Automation is not for everything
The scope of automation needs to be determined before beginning with any of the projects. There are a few criteria which are used for selecting those test cases as they need to be executed repeatedly, troublesome to perform manually, and most time-consuming which can also risk your business. The other few categories like newly proposed designs cannot be executed manually as you cannot change those requirements which are previously executed on an Ad-HOC.
7 Preferences for Selected tools
Therefore, when it comes to selecting the right tool, there are some defined criteria that can actually help you in picking up the right tool as per your requirements. It also supports variant types of tests by including functional, testing management and mobile apps by maintaining the appropriate support.
8 Time-saving testing and test automation
One of the main objectives for test automation is to reduce your time as much as you can. Here, the thing is that it does not has anything to do with the automation if you are going for manual testing. Instead what makes testing take a more long time is the fact of looking for bugs as the bugs need to be fixed and the process has to get repeated again. The test maintenance may take a longer time than a manual test but step-ups and execution can take much longer time. Analyzing failures and clear-ups may significantly take much more time but ideally, it is advised that you should have all your activities associated with more automation that consumes less time.
9 Automatic Maintenance
The automation scripts are required to be added to the system which is under test with successive cycles as they need to be checked thoroughly and maintained after every release cycle. It is essential to maintain the automation for improving the effectiveness of automation scripts. You can use automation tasks to simplify your routine duties like restarts, cleaning up temp files and defrags.
When you automate the patch management, we can ensure that the machines are working up to date with the latest software patches by ensuring system stability. You can upload your own custom scripts or run scripts given in the library which can automatically trigger them to run after a failed monitoring check.
Summing Up
A good test automation solution requires to take more into the account rather than just a list of tools that drive the tests. For successful automation, you need to give a thought to your test data strategy for how you manage your test environment and the way you inform your audience about the results of the automation tests. Keep Learning!
