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Automated testing quickly becomes a non-negotiable, if not the most crucial approach, a major aspect of software testing. It has accelerated the software development life cycle in the past few decades. Hence, an effective strategy will establish a foundation of success for the software application.

Users usually have a lot of expectations of the product being released. Before the testing, there should be effective planning to ensure that all requirements are met. For achieving the maximum results, it is important to separate the types of tests that can be done automatically or need a manual approach. For instance, if you need to check a particular condition, manual testing will give you a chance to check it immediately. However, using automated testing will reduce the time of doing repetitive tests and concentrate specialists’ time on other tasks. Below are tips to consider before defining the test automation strategy for your team.

Pick the right strategy

Various strategies are used in automated testing, and in that case, you have to pick the best strategy before defining it to the team. It provides a roadmap of how a team will carry out activities, and it should be a well-thought strategy that will deliver the best results for the organization.

You can choose to work with the test automation pyramid or risk-based testing. The test automation pyramid will improve the ROI of the process and set clear guidelines that will yield maximum benefits. Most of the testing should occur in this strategy at the development stage.

For the risk-based strategy, a higher priority is placed on testing elements of the system that are at higher risk of failing. This helps to prevent the worst failures from happening to the software. Before using this strategy, you have to do a risk analysis to decide which test cases are at higher risk.

Set realistic expectations

Before assigning any task to the team, you should evaluate their QA engineer’s skills level. Are your expectations in line with the capabilities of the team members? At this point, you may of course wish to consider the use of no code test automation tools, as no-code or codeless automation tools should require no prior coding experience. That means that any QA person, whether an engineer or not, should be able to create and execute tests to validate business logic. Strategic automated testing can indeed save you time, resources, and the headache of worrying about errors at the end.

Sometimes you cannot overly rely on automated testing as not everything can be automated. Even when the computers are set to operate through a predetermined set of procedures, the team members will still need to perform some tasks. 

If you try to implement a test automation strategy without setting your expectations clearly, your efforts will be in vain. There will be a lot of conflicts among team members as they really won’t understand what they have to cover next. In some cases, most of the tasks will be done partially as they depend on knowledge they are not used to for long.

Ensure everyone is on board

Every project needs the participation of all members for it to be successful. It’s not about enforcing measures as the team leader or the company manager; it’s the other way around. You have to be involved in most of the processes to ensure that everything is operating as intended at the start.

Sometimes you may even need help from the group members, and collaborating with all members will ensure that you get help as fast as possible. That means you have to be there when everything is being carried out to understand effectively what’s happening.

Getting involved in the process will motivate the team members and help them realize the value of test automation. You will also be able to ensure that everyone is on board and has the right tools. 

Decide on what’s worth automating

If it’s not everything requiring automation, what should you automate? This is the first question that you should use to select the tests that are to be automated. A clear automation strategy should include the processes worth automating and those that are not.

By the time you are about to start the process, you should have created and defined the data set for the necessary tests and singled out the ones that entirely need manual testing. Automated testing is particularly useful when the software you are using has accumulated a lot of technical debt, several complexities, and when the tests are very time-consuming. These are tasks that have defined test suites that must be executed periodically.

Review your test code

Test code must be tested as many times as possible with its changes. That’s because automation is vulnerable to false positives and false negatives. The outcomes on the two may or may not sound the right alarms that will inform you about the critical errors in the software application.

When these errors happen too often, the teams may lose morale as they have no confidence in the rest of the test cases. Some will feel like they are just wasting their time on something that will not give them proper results.

Before defining your strategy to the team members, you should focus on evaluating all the test cases and aligning them to the needs of the software. So, it’s very critical to ensure that you have the correct test assertions.

Conclusion

Before defining the Test Automation Strategy for your team, you should consider various things. Among them, the strategy to be used should highly be factored in as it determines the outcomes of the final product. The tips mentioned above will help you prepare adequately before deciding when to define the test automation process to the team members. Ensure everyone is on board to avoid unnecessary delays that eventually affect the software functionality.

Featured Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay