How To Develop Strategies for Test Automation

Test automation is becoming more and more in demand today as software engineers and programmers are trying to come out with better test automation frameworks while reducing costs and increasing efficiency. The big challenge is how we could be able to produce a test automation tool that can cover the multitude of applications and diverse projects that await test automation.

In developing test automation tools, we must consider several factors to ensure the creation of full-blown software and not end up like other automation frameworks that failed in the past.

1. Test Automation is a time-consuming team effort. Two keywords describe the meaning of the first strategy to ensure good test automation. It is (a) time-consuming and (b) it is a team effort. The complexities of making a test automation design and coding it is undoubtedly a repetitive task and requires a bit more time than the usual office hours. To ensure a great result, test automation also needs many great minds converging to produce a single great outcome.
2. Manage your team’s technical skills accordingly. As for the specialization of skills needed to create the test design and the test framework, you must be able to segregate the diversity of technical skills your programmers and software engineers have. Doing this enables you to yield results you desire with great efficiency so as not to force untrained people to do a certain task. This means: leave the test design process to people with test design skills and have the people who are experienced with test framework deal with test framework tasks. These are totally different sectors of a test automation cycle and must be dealt with accordingly.
3. Use application-independent variables to avoid script failure. If time is not a major concern in making a test automation design and framework, there really wouldn’t be any problems. The fact is, time always matters. Thus we cannot afford to code scripts for every application and component we use to test our design. Not only will this make the scripts exceedingly jam-packed, it will also make it too complex for one person or even a team to read and execute. In the end it will yield in an increased risk of scripting failure. Therefore, to solve this problem, using variables to replace large scripts to make the design and framework scripting an executable input is the way to do it. The trick is to make application-specific scripts through the use of variables to make the entire process simplified and more efficient.
4. Simple maintenance and documentation are the goals. Adjacent to making the scripts simple enough through use of application-specific variables, the framework should be made as independent entities form other modules in the project. This is to make the entire test automation framework easy to manage and maintain. This strategy should eliminate the problems of re-scripting the entire framework due to a problem in one module. Documentation, on the other hand, is a way to make the test automation software easy to understand and use in the future. Doing so means publishing the software project so that people will understand what the automation framework does and it can be easily maintained.

The ultimate goal of test automation development is to reduce the involvement of testers and programmers in such a highly intricate process. This strategy aims to make the concentration of skills be put to where it’s supposed to be to make the test automation development and design not just efficient, but also effective.