Software Test Automation Observations
When an automation tester needs to execute automated scripts this should be due to work needs, not based on his/her perception only. We believe in test automation and need automation scripts to be valuable and satisfy project needs, not only to say that we have automation scripts. Automation testers should use test automation in complex, long, and repeatable scenarios that can be able to catch the issues as fast as we can and will be hard to be used by manual testers. Anyone in the development team should be able to execute the script easily and automation testers should simplify the way of execution (e,g: batch files) as some of the product owners or business analysts or manual testers may need to execute some scenarios for demo purposes or to validate some deployment regressions or for some other reasons. In addition, we may utilize automation scripts for comparison and validation of migrated data.
As long as there is no target from automation scripts, no automated test plan, the scripts are written and executed ad-hoc, and the automation tester is not working on the targeted deployments, integrations, migrations, sensitive scenarios, complex scenarios, hence there wouldn’t be any value from automation and it will be a waste. The spent time by automation tester for normal scenarios that can be finalized by manual testers within hours considered a waste of time. The automation tester should be involved in everything in the project, sprints, scheduled deployments, ad-hoc deployments. The automation tester should know the business well, explore the system and be active in the project. Automation scripts should raise the testing coverage as well, not only to execute automated and do something fancy.
It would be good if we activated continuous testing and let automation scripts executed automatically based on pre-scheduled times as per project needs. Production may have some exploratory automation scripts as per the project need for some APIs, services, sensitive screens, or scenarios as well. There should be an automation plan to be followed and updated continuously and synced with the regression test plan. Select what is the scope of automation is a very important task that saves time and should be done at the earliest of the project/phase/sprint start. Finally, we are looking for the value of automation …. not to say we have automation only.
Written by Ahmed Abdelmaksoud
