Edwin Moses is considered one of the greatest hurdlers of all time. Winner of two Olympic gold medals, he also set several records in the 400m hurdles during his career. There is perhaps no better sport to illustrate the challenges to be overcome than the obstacles, which are linked to today’s ever-changing technological landscape. Businesses need agility and responsiveness to meet customer needs and stay competitive. Just as obstacles present challenges that every hurdler must overcome during competition, so does the process of software development and testing.
One way to overcome these obstacles is to ensure that software development and delivery processes are efficient and reliable. However, web and mobile applications are becoming increasingly complex, and testing them thoroughly 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 obstacle. It enables developers and QA to reduce human risk while accelerating their testing and increasing coverage. However, that doesn’t turn hurdles into a sprint, and many companies need help implementing automated testing. Some of the challenges they face include a lack of skilled resources, difficulties in integrating the tools into existing processes, and the need for extensive planning and coordination.
That’s why we’ve included these tips to help you ace your automation tests. Of course, no process is perfect and no system is truly flawless, but your ongoing automated testing will be successful 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 won all the time.”
Prepare the perfect automated test 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 walk through the whole process:
- Describe the goals and objectives of the automation process. These goals should align with business goals and focus on software quality, reducing time to market and cost.
- Define the scope of automation. Includes identifying the types of tests that will be automated and the software features that need to be tested.
- Select tools including automation tools and frameworks. These should be evaluated to see if they integrate with existing development tools and support the types of testing required.
- Prepare the implementation schedule by identifying specific tasks, estimating the time required for each, and then setting deadlines. The schedule should take into account the size of the team, the complexity and the availability of resources.
- Assign roles and responsibilities to team members:
- 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 test framework.
- QA Engineers – Ensure the testing process meets quality standards.
- Developers fix defects and support the testing team.
- Project managers manage the project schedule and budget.
Conduct team training
Training and education are key to preparing your team to execute the automation test strategy. It starts with identifying areas where your team needs to improve their knowledge and expertise. To do this, assess the current skill level of your team and discover existing knowledge gaps. Once you have this knowledge, you can create 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 people you need to use different methods like classroom training, online courses, workshops, and hands-on sessions. If you are lucky enough to have an experienced team member, 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 to encourage practical experience. This will help give your team the freedom to work on a real project using the automation testing strategy you have developed. Access to resources such as blogs, webinars, and conferences will help your team stay up to date and continue learning.
Education and training are continuous processes. Therefore, it’s important to revisit your training plans from time to time to ensure they remain relevant and effective.
Maintain automation processes
With your strategy in place, most of the work of maintaining processes and scaling with confidence is already done. However, it is critical to establish a robust automation framework that can handle environment and application changes. This involves creating reusable components that you can modify and replace without bringing down the whole automation suite. Additionally, your maintenance plan should indicate how often your tests are reviewed and updated. This will ensure that your tests are still valid and that changes made to the application are reflected in the tests.
Scaling with confidence comes next and requires investment in hardware, software, and network resources, so you have the right infrastructure to support your test automation. Finally, regular analysis of reports is important because it will help you identify areas for improvement. This way, you will constantly optimize your automation process to increase efficiency and effectiveness.
These are the technical considerations. Your automation team is just as important. They must be skilled and motivated to develop, maintain and evolve the automation process. Stakeholders can achieve this by investing in training and development to teach teams the latest tools and technologies. Finally, it is necessary to create a culture of continuous improvement and innovation that encourages the automation team to experiment with new ideas and share these discoveries throughout the organization.
Review of results
You need to review your results, and there are several ways to do this, although we have a better way to share with you. Obviously, the first step is to check whether your tests passed or failed. Seems simple enough. Remember, though, it’s about matching actual and expected results. This means you need to debug the test case to see what happens if a test fails. You do this by reviewing logs, errors, and other identifying information. Code review is also important to ensure that your automation tests run smoothly.
The Digital.ai difference
Test automation runs generate a ton of data. This is the data your teams need to know and use to examine the overall health of the system and see where gaps need to be filled and where improvements can be made.
Using an AI analysis tool like the one offered by Digital.ai Intelligence brings transparency to your SDLC by stitching together thousands of data points with AI-infused algorithms to align technical features with business needs.
The use of AI improves decision making and reduces the burden of manual tasks. Our AI and ML models excel at discovering relationships and data patterns that would take a manual user hours to complete. As a result, it allows software delivery teams to accomplish faster without putting the organization at risk.
