The Way to Employ Automation in Testing

You’ve just started a brand-new role at a company and the very first job you’ve got before you is to execute test automation.

Now, this business hasn’t done any type of test automation and today is relying on a hodgepodge of methods to test and measure quality.

Where do you start and how can you start such a momentous task? I am glad you asked.

We are going to be talking about the general, fundamental theories encompassing test automation — not particular tools or frameworks you want to use since those will change depending on what your organisation's unique needs.

Do not dive straight into
To start: many people try and begin by simply going ahead and trying to automate all of the evaluations that are presently being performed manually.

The problem with that is we do not know if any of these tests are any good or perhaps worth keeping in the first place. Simply because they exist today does not mean it’s something we should go and automate. Those evaluations can certainly be relics from an old version that no one has thought to remove (and believe us we’ve seen plenty of those!).

Map how you now examine
Before you even start diving into automation of any kind, the taste would be really to begin on mapping out how you’re presently performing testing.

You want to understand the current approach to testing and work out the best place to integrate automatic evaluations.

A fantastic place to begin at a lot of organizations is creating the data because you are likely to need that for your automatic checks (and to the tests).

The end goal must be to understand just what testing needs to occur at what’condition’ the application is in and automate at which you can inside those’states’. As an example, you might need exploratory/crowdsourced testing at one’condition’ of this application and regression at another’condition’. Both of these testing types require different sorts of automation.

But if you’d just jumped in automating, you could easily have caused heartache where it didn’t have to be and slow down your current processes.

From our experience we see a lot of new starters dip in to automate all their skillset lets without fully understanding how things have been done and assessing the right way for automation in testing must be implemented based on the point (or condition’) the application is in.

Use present development language
Concerning development language, you ought to go with whatever the stack’s built-in, and there are advantages to this (firstly, the developers will thank you). You’ll also have the ability to speed up the degree of automation coverage and move quicker (you’ll also have the opportunity to leverage tools like Chef and Puppet to add a level of CI if you are familiar with a language you are familiar with).

For instance, consider a cell app. If you proceed to a business that’s got a mobile program, the first place you would start is knowing how you distribute the testing environment app to devices, because that’s something that you’re testing team will do all day.

So, start by automating the deployment of the app so that you can quickly get out many versions to devices and then go from there. A great deal of the logic of these programs is in the API, so then go and look at automating something on the API level and work your way up with time.

Besides, you need to think about the automation that the team itself can complete.

Among the greatest misconceptions, people have about automatic testing is that it’s around the automation tools if it is all about the mindset that you want to automate where and when you require it.

Technical skillset, although important, won’t provide you the knowledge to know what is important to implement and what is not important. A specific degree of critical thinking is needed so that you automate functions that will improve the quality of your software.

Conclusion

Fundamentally, automation in testing for any company comes down to deciding upon the most demanding regions to automate.

Remember my How To Implement Test Automation For the Very First-time tips:

Understanding how testing works in your company and then building a roadmap where automation will help is your best approach. This gives you the building blocks to build an effective strategy to automating the ideal things, at the ideal time, for your organization.