A Complete Guide to Dos and Don’ts of Test Automation

Automation Testing is a key part of the DevOps process. Without it, developers would have to
run tests and ensure their code works as expected manually. This would be time-consuming,
tedious, and prone to human error—not to mention a waste of resources.

Automating tests can help you save time and money while ensuring your code is working
correctly before deploying it. It allows developers to create tests that can be run
automatically, freeing them up to focus on other aspects of the project. Test automation is
also less prone to human error than traditional testing methods, which makes it more
reliable.

While test automation is a great way to speed up your testing process and make it more
efficient, there are a few best practices that you should keep in mind. In this article, we’ll
walk you through some of Do’s and Don’ts so that you can get the best from your test
automation efforts.

Define Goals
The very first thing you need to do is define your goals. What do you want test automation
to achieve? Will it help you deliver more features faster? Will it reduce the number of bugs
in production? Once you know what you want, focus on the metrics that will help track
progress toward those goals. You should also set up a way to measure those metrics on an
ongoing basis so that you can see how well test automation is working for your team over
time.

Another tip: make sure everyone on your team has access to the same information when
they’re making decisions about how best to use their time (this includes developers, testers,
managers, etc.). This will help ensure everyone’s efforts align with what’s important for
overall success—not just their personal goals!

Do Use a Continuous Integration Environment For Automated Testing
Continuous integration is the best DevOps practice where team members integrate their
work continually. Usually, each person integrates at least daily. If you’re using a continuous
integration environment for automated testing, this is a good thing.

In simple terms, it means that if your code works on one machine, then it should work on all
machines (and vice versa). In other words: “When I commit my changes in Git and push
them up to GitHub, they should build successfully without errors or warnings.”

Choose which tests to automate
It’s important to choose which test cases you want to automate first. It’s not a good idea to
select random tests and then try to figure out how to automate them later.

Get all the right people involved.
You will need people who understand business objectives, technical knowledge and coding
skills. If you don’t have these types of people in your organization already, consider hiring
them or bringing them in as contractors for this project.

Don’t Automate Your Tests
So you’re sold on the idea of test automation. Great! But before you get started, there are a
couple of things to keep in mind.

Don’t automate your tests until you have a good understanding of what you want to test.
Automating tests is an excellent way to save time and money, but it’s not worth doing if
your tests aren’t valuable in the first place (or worse yet, they’re misleading). If there are
gaps in your current suite of automated tests–or if none of them cover certain areas–work
on filling those gaps before spending any time automating efforts that may be fruitless
down the road.

Don’t automate everything at once either; start small by choosing one or two areas where
automation would make sense right now (for example: “I want more information about how
this feature works”) and then build up from there over time as required based upon what
works well versus poorly within those initial projects/products under test.”

Do Not Overlook The Value Of Manual Testing
Manual testing is important for all types of projects, especially when there are changes
happening in the project or product under test. When you first start automating, it can be
difficult to figure out how your automated tests are going to work with those changes, so
having manual tests in place can help you find bugs that might not be evident if you were
only working with automated tests at that point in time.

Don’t Start Automating From The First Day Itself
If you have just started with automation, then it is better to start from the basics – manual
testing. This will help you understand how things work during manual testing and what all
problems can arise during automated testing. You can also find out which areas are difficult
for testers to test manually and automate those using automated scripts.

Don’t Ignore Performance Testing
Performance testing is an important part of automated testing, and it’s often overlooked.
When you are developing automation scripts, it is critical that you create tests that simulate
real-world conditions as closely as possible, and performance testing will help you do this. If
your automation scripts don’t run quickly enough or if they take too long to run through all
the scenarios, then you’ve got a problem. This could result in poor test coverage and even
unhappy customers! And no one wants that!

Use Multiple Automation Platforms
There are several types of test automation platforms available on the market today; some
are free, while others come with a price tag. But whatever type of platform you choose to
work with, make sure it works with other platforms so they can communicate with one
another seamlessly. This will allow testers who use only one type of automation platform
(or even just one tool) access all the information they need while automating tests—which
means less debugging time!

Conclusion

Test automation is not a silver bullet. It won’t magically make your tests run faster or find
more bugs. But if you’re using it right, automation can help streamline your testing process
and ensure that new features have not broken any existing functionality before they get
released into production. Kindly contact us at Prime QA Solutions – A software QA Testing Company in Ahmedabad, India.