How to Ensure That Your Automated Testing is a Success

Edwin Moses is considered one of the greatest hurdlers of all time. A winner of two Olympic gold medals, he also set multiple records in the 400m hurdles in his career. There may be no better sport to illustrate overcoming challenges than hurdles, which ties into today’s ever-evolving technological landscape. Enterprises need agility and responsiveness to respond to customer needs and stay competitive. Like hurdles that feature challenges that each hurdler must overcome during the competition, the same is true of the software development and testing process.

One of the ways to overcome these hurdles is to ensure that software development and delivery processes are efficient and reliable. However, web and mobile apps are becoming more complex, and thoroughly testing them is a significant hurdle that could give any large company pause.

Automated testing as a solution is like the best track shoes giving you the comfort, speed, and agility to overcome any hurdle. It allows developers and QA to reduce human risk while speeding up their testing and increasing coverage. However, this does not turn the hurdles into a sprint, and many enterprises need help implementing automated testing. Some challenges they face include a lack of skilled resources, difficulties integrating tools with existing processes, and the need for extensive planning and coordination.

This is why we have included these tips to help you succeed with your automation testing. Of course, no process is perfect, and no system is truly flawless, but your continuous automated testing will be a success with a great strategy, a talented team, and the right tools. As Edwin Moses himself said, “I don’t think I was a perfect hurdler, but I guess I did win all the time.”

Preparing the Perfect Automated Testing Strategy

Preparing an automated testing strategy is essential. However, it presents challenges as it contains many moving parts and requires different personas and roles within an organization to communicate and collaborate to ensure successful outcomes.

Let’s go through the entire process:

• Outline automation process goals and objectives. These goals should align with business objectives and focus on software quality, reducing time-to-market and costs.
• Define the scope of automation. Includes identifying the types of tests that will be automated and software features that need to be tested.
• Select tools, including automation tools and frameworks. These must be evaluated to see if they integrate with existing development tools and support required test types.
• Prepare the implementation timeline by identifying specific tasks, estimating the time required for each, and then setting deadlines. The timeline must consider team size, complexity, and resource availability.
• Assign team members roles and responsibilities:
  • Test Managers – plan, coordinate, and manage the testing process.
  • Test Analysts – analyze project requirements, develop and execute tests, and report defects to the development team.
  • Automation engineers – develop, implement and maintain the automation testing framework.
  • QA Engineers – Ensure that the testing process meets quality standards.
  • Developers fix defects and support the testing team.
  • Project Managers manage the project timeline and budget.

Conduct Team Training

Training and education are essential in preparing your team to execute the automation testing strategy. It starts with identifying the areas where your team needs to improve their knowledge and expertise. How to accomplish this is to evaluate your team’s current skill level and discover the existing knowledge gaps. Once you have that knowledge, you can develop a training plan that includes the topics and techniques your team needs. From there, you can set goals and objectives for the training sessions.

However, people have different learning styles, and to cater to these individuals, you need to use different methods like classroom training, online courses, workshops, and hands-on practice sessions. If you are fortunate enough to have a team member with experience, they can act as a mentor to answer questions and support other team members.

One of the most critical parts of a training process is encouraging hands-on experience. It will help to give your team the freedom to work on an actual project using the automation testing strategy you have developed. Access to resources like blogs, webinars, and conferences will help your team stay current and keep their learning continuous.

Education and training are ongoing processes. Therefore, it is important to revisit your training plans from time to time to ensure they stay relevant and effective.

Maintain Automation Processes

With your strategy in place, the bulk of the work maintaining processes and confidently scaling is already done. However, establishing a robust automation framework that can handle environmental and application changes is essential. It involves creating reusable components you can modify and replace without bringing down the entire automation suite. Additionally, your maintenance plan should outline how often your tests are reviewed and updated. That will ensure that your tests are still valid and application changes are reflected in the tests.

Scaling with confidence comes next and necessitates an investment in hardware, software, and network resources, so you have the proper infrastructure to back your test automation. Finally, regularly analyzing reports is important as it will help you identify areas for improvement. That way, you will constantly optimize your automation process to increase efficiency and effectiveness.

Those are the technical considerations. Your automation team is as important. They need to be skilled and motivated to develop, maintain, and scale the automation process. Stakeholders can realize this by investing in training and development to teach teams the latest tools and technologies. Lastly is the need to create a culture of continuous improvement and innovation that encourages the automation team to experiment with new ideas and share these findings across the organization.

Examining the Results

You need to review your results, and there are a few ways you can accomplish this though we have an even better way to share with you. Obviously, step one is to check if your tests have passed or failed. Seems simple enough. Remember, though, that it is about matching actual and expected results. That means you need to debug the test case to see what happened if a test fails. You can do this by looking at logs, errors, and other identifying information. Code review is also important when ensuring your automation tests function correctly.

The Digial.ai Difference

Test automation executions generate a ton of data. This is the data that your teams need to familiarize themselves with and use to examine the system’s health overall and see where gaps need filling, and improvements can be made.

Using an AI analytics tool like the one offered by Digital.ai Intelligence brings transparency to your SDLC by stitching thousands of data points together with AI-Infused algorithms to align technical functionality with business needs.

Using AI enhances decision-making and reduces the burden of manual tasks. Our AI and ML models excel at uncovering relationships and data patterns that would take a manual user many hours to complete. As a result, it allows software delivery teams to accomplish faster without exposing the organization to risk.