The How’s of Test Automation

Test automation is an important part of the quality strategy of most organizations. At the same time, it only consumes less time and cost. But the question is, how is test automation done? The same as how much automation costs? This article might give answers to these how’s in automation.

Factors in an Effective Test Automation

For the test automation to be effective, there are some factors to consider. Also, the return of the investment must align with these factors. If not, the long-term positive effects of automation will possibly fail.

You must consider the following:

• The development paradigm such as agile or non-agile and instrumented or non-instrumented
• The quality objectives such as defect escape velocity
• The target deployment velocity including the volume of new and enhanced functionality per release

How to Implement Automation

To implement test automation, it requires people, process, and technology. To explain further, check on the following:

The people perspective

It is important that the people involved in the implementation must:

• Have internal expertise in order to ensure the right application of automation
• Be trained on the test automation paradigm and tool to use

The process perspective

Determining how automated testing fits into the development process is very vital for the testing group. To do this, the process must:

• Focus on high-yield automation activities such as test data creation, smoke test, and regression test
• Integrates test automation into the overall process of development

The technology

The key programs, such as the development paradigm and the target deployment velocity, determine how to apply automation technology. The technology to use must be able to:

• Address the deployment velocity challenge for high deployment velocities and lower deployment velocities.
• Address the quality gaps in the development paradigm for lightweight test automation and heavyweight test automation.

How Must Is the Test Automation

As mentioned above, the key factors in automation are people, process, and technology. They are indeed important when it comes to deciding on how much the application should automate. However, there are still some guidelines to consider:

• Test automation is not a solution. Instead, it is a tool for finding solutions.
• Automating the whole process of testing
• There must be at least a 4 to 1 yield on the return of investment. If you have too much ongoing maintenance, ROI can possibly decrease. This is unless the application becomes static.

Moreover, determining the cost of automation depends on which factors the organizations focus on. Ensuring that quality objectives are met can significantly increase deployment velocity. Nevertheless, if the objective is to focus on reducing the overall testing effort, then better to focus on high-yield automation activities.

How to Measure the ROI

The success of automation greatly depends on the yield of ROI. In fact, there are many ways to measure ROI in automated testing. The following are:

• Knowledge leakage
• Defect leakage
• New tests automation
• Prior tests automation
• Test redundancy and reuse
• Coverage across environments

Winding up

When doing application tests, automation is a faster and more efficient way. But always remember to consider some factors before implementing automated tests. Automating your system will eventually fail if you ignore such essential factors.