Test Automation Strategy and How this is a Team Objective

Adapting a Test Automation Strategy is very important and the survival rate is high only when automation is embraced as a team objective. The days where test automation is left to be dealt only by the Quality Engineers are gone !  Test automation paves way for return on investment and time management for the project when every team member contribute to it in their own way. Simply put, Test Automation is also a Software Development Process as stated by 'Angie Jones'.

The following points are considered vital for any test automation strategy,

• Purpose: Entire development team must be aware of the purpose of automation and the automation goal should be communicated across the team. The purpose and need for automation varies from team to team;  like reduction of manual testing time, regression test suite, achieve in-sprint automation etc

• Team Structure: One or more members depending on the project, are solely vested the responsibility for test automation, aside manual testing team. A senior resource should review the test scripts/code and approve the pull requests for the project. Manual testers should be able to provide solid feedback to automation team on the stability of the features and various paths of testing for the feature. Adequate training time has to be planned for manual testers who are trying to get exposure to automation testing.

• Tool Selection: Based on the nature of the application, appropriate test automation tool and scripting language is chosen. It is always wise to draw a comparison chart with features for various test tools and make a selection based on the most suitable and adaptable option.  If Javascript browser UI, choose Cypress and if the application requires more browser compatibility testing, choose Saucelabs or Browserstack etc

• Monitoring: The test results must be monitored and the progress has to be shared to the stakeholders in an impressive way. Example, enable a dashboard feature to view the progress of tests, add a plugin to generate html reports of the test output or integrate the test tool dashboard with the teams communication channel, like Slack or Teams.

• Team Objective: Each and every member of the team can contribute to test automation in their own way. Scrum Master can facilitate meetings, address to any issues related to automation and include Automation Testing in the 'Definition of Done'. Developers can engage in test automation framework whenever possible and testers can seek guidance from developers in case of any technical debts. Business analysts can support by providing advise on the business flow that needs to be automated in every feature rather than just UI interaction.

• Maintenance: Test Automation Framework should be maintained and be taken care of Pesticide Paradox. The errors in test outputs have to examined if caused due to bugs in source code or test scripts. New tests have to be added as the project evolves and redundant tests have to be removed periodically. 

• Future Proofing: Tests have to be independent on its own and be able to run in parallel and across various browsers, to save time. 

I hope the above points have given a brief outline of ideas to consider before adopting a test strategy. Happy Testing !