6 Key Success Factors for Improving Test Automation Outcomes
With digital transformation becoming the forefront priority of every business, delivering quality software products has become crucial in today’s market. Although agile software development has improved the CI/CD pipeline, it has also increased the demand for quality software testing. To deliver a reliable and quality application to the market, businesses need a rigorous and comprehensive testing plan, which is consistent and repetitive.
Software testing is the first and last line of defense for any product in the CI/CD pipeline, and if it isn’t performed accurately, the product will not provide expected results. Automation testing does improve the testing speed while saving resources, but it should be 100 percent stable for the product’s success. Thus, QAs need a successful test automation plan, which provides easy, repetitive, and cost-effective software testing.
But the test automation plan must have an objective for the application that you need to test. For instance, if you want to automate the functional testing, the automation test should be focused on testing the application’s features and functionality. Besides having an objective and a strategy, test automation often fails.
Why Test Automation Fails?
Automation testing is not new in the software industry. Many businesses are already using it for the past few years to improve their testing cycles. But not every test automation cycle is successful; testers often face failures due to multiple reasons, such as;
Frequent failures happen due to interconnected systems, high complexity, and inconsistencies in the test environment
Higher maintenance and frequent updates for conventional script-based test automation
Executing simple automated conventional tests require long execution times, which affects the performance resulting in the test failure
Running regression tests continuously doesn’t provide accurate, immediate feedback on the recent changes in the application
Now, the above reasons could be avoided if you follow essential factors for successful test automation. The primary purpose of following a strict test automation approach is to ensure that all application aspects are tested, and defects are identified.
Here, we will talk about six essential factors that can help you improve your test automation outcomes.
Have a Dedicated Team of Automation Testers
As we are talking about automation testing, having manual testers in your team could be a disaster. Manual testers are not trained to execute automation testing, neither are they well-versed with the complexity of automation tools used in test automation. Having a staff with professional testers experienced in automation testing and various testing tools is critical for test automation success.
With a dedicated team, you can expect guaranteed results and outcomes from your test automation cycles. However, you need to ensure that the team members are well-versed with all the automation testing scenarios for the specified application.
Build Robust Automation Architecture and Tests
Automation testing is not just about executing tests continuously with an automation framework; it requires a well-structured test design that can be maintained and stabilized over time. Some testers even follow an action-based testing approach to achieve automation-friendly test designs. In this approach, tests are organized in modules and written as sequences of keyword-based actions.
Building robust tests that easily integrate into the regression suite is also crucial for testers because there is no other way to make automation testing reliable. It would help if you built test cases with sufficient flexibility to adapt long-term regression testing requirements. Whether you’re generating scripted or scriptless tests, they must satisfy the following criteria; Accuracy, Integrity, Maintainability, Portability, Versioning, Performance, etc.
The primary purpose of building a robust automation architecture and test cases is to execute automated tests consistently with accuracy, smoothness, and high performance. If the tests are stable and concise, you can quickly finish your regression testing phase while avoiding unnecessary modifications.
Execute Tests in Parallel
Agile development is all about short iterations in a CI/CD pipeline, which means if you execute test automation on a large scale, you won’t achieve the desired results. Running short, frequent sprints results in more bugs requiring more fixes. And it often becomes challenging to find, fix, and test the products of each iteration.
However, it is possible to execute test automation successfully if enough time is allocated for testing alongside the development cycle. One way to achieve this is the parallel testing of test scripts. This will allow the entire automation process to be more responsive to new requirements while improving your team’s productivity. Besides, you’ll get time for exploratory testing, which is crucial even in the most highly automated environments.
Select the Right Tool
No matter what approach you follow for the test automation, if you don’t have the right automation tool to execute the tests, it won’t be worth it. Considering the number of automation testing tools available in the market, selecting one among them is a little challenging. So, before making your selection, evaluate the tool based on the following criteria:
- Offers end-to-end testing for all the testing scenarios
- Comes with an easy-to-use interface, extensive features, and user navigation
- Helps in accumulating and maintaining a suite of regression test
- Easy integration with other testing frameworks like Selenium for cross browser testing
- Provide quick test results with bug tracking and identify defects
- Offers continuous technical support and assistance for queries
- Provides record and playback functionality to share with your team members
Considering all the above pointers we highly recommend our users to try LambdaTest a top notch cross browser testing platform that offers users a combination of 2000+ browsers & OS to test on.
Cost-efficient and doesn’t affect your budget
If the automation testing tool meets the above criteria, it’s a good choice. For example, LambdaTest is a great utility that can fulfill all your automation testing requirements. It enables you to test your application for responsive testing, unit testing, functional testing, cross browser testing, and more.
Create Concise and Efficient Tests
After building a robust automation framework selecting the ideal tool, it’s time to create your test cases. Make sure that the tests are concise and lean without any errors. This way, it will be easier for you to use the test data and achieve expected testing outcomes. Besides, small and feature-specific test cases contribute to a manageable and solid regression suite that can be maintained at all levels.
Creating concise and efficient tests also makes it easy for the testers to understand them and execute them easily without contradiction, especially for applications containing various programming languages, scenarios, and configurations.
Monitor the Changes and Modifications
Frequent changes and modifications are necessary for every application to keep up with the latest algorithms and changing requirements. Even if the application is up and running, it is important that testing teams continuously monitor the changes throughout the development environment, including the modifications to the cloud environments, complex virtual machine clusters, and external databases. Understanding the core and changing environments will help you stay focused on achieving quality targets.
Automation can solve a lot of issues in software development, but it cannot be applied everywhere. Thus, the scope of automation should be determined before starting the project. Ensure that you automate only those fields that are necessary to improve the test outcomes.
Wrap Up
Test automation can improve the testing process to a great extent while offering reliability and stability. But it is not necessary that your tests won’t fail with automation. If you don’t follow a specific approach, the tests are most likely to fail most of the time. In this article, we discussed six factors that can determine the success of your test automation outcomes. If you feel like something else could be added to it, let us know in the comments.
