Today’s growing demand to deliver qualitative software faster requires organizations to search for solutions in Agile, Continuous Integration and DevOps methodologies.  Test automation is an essential part of this process, but in a lot of cases testing, manual and automated, often becomes a bottleneck in this process.  The reasons can be various, but very often the problem begins with the choice of tooling to support this process.  So how can we tackle this? How can we avoid test automation becoming a bottleneck for the organization?

First things first

It’s not a best practice to start thinking about test automation before a structured test process is in place.  The reason is obvious, test automation should fit into this testing process.  So, first think about what you want to test and how you want to test it.  Once this test process is in place, it’s time to start thinking about optimizing it by introducing test automation.  Luckily there are plenty of test automation tools, frameworks and libraries available, each and every one of them has its own advantages and disadvantages, but not every solution will suit your project’s prerequisites.  And this is where the problem begins …

In order to choose the most appropriate tool you will need to closely examine the project’s specifics.  The first important question you need to ask yourself is: What do you want to achieve with test automation?  On which levels do you want to test?  Do you want to perform unit, component, integration or system testing?  And, which kind of tests do you want to execute on each level?  Once decided, then you can start thinking about automating these tests.

Determine prerequisites

Maintaining the quality of an application by delivering a bug-free product is crucial for the success of any project.  Automated testing can help improve the quality of a project and increase the testing scope & depth.  But to achieve this, we must choose the right tool for the job.  Therefore, we need to get a deep understanding of the project requirements such as project type (web/desktop/mobile), scope of the project, existing team’s strength on code language, … before you start the process of choosing an automation solution.  No tool is good or bad, the ROI (return on investment) of any tool or solution relies on the need, the prerequisites.  In order to determine these prerequisites, you can ask yourself some questions:

This is just a part of the questions you need to ask yourself before selecting a tool…

Automation solutions

Based on the prerequisites we can already make a list of possible automation candidates, but there is still one important question to be asked.  What is the available budget? Depending on the answer you can determine whether to go for:

In a lot of cases we see that commercial tools are often too expensive and open-source solutions require too much technical knowledge.  Fortunately there is a solution in between, this solution is called a test automation framework.

Automation framework

A test automation framework is a defined, extensible support structure, which consists of a combination of best practices designed to help in developing, maintaining and executing automated tests more efficiently.  It requires development time to implement such a framework, but this is a one time cost (instead of a recurring license cost).  The major advantage of an automation framework is that it can be fully customized, based on the needs (prerequisites) of the organization.  They offer a lot of flexibility in all kinds of aspects:

Once developed, a framework must facilitate a standard way for modifying, adding, and deleting test scripts, and should provide scalability and reliability with less effort.  These kind of frameworks also give you the benefit that you as an organization have everything under control, you are not depending on any tool vendor. Developing your own automation framework, customized to your needs, will come with an initial development cost, but it will make you more futureproof.

Conclusion

Setting up a test (automation) strategy isn’t something you do overnight; it takes time, effort and for sure some insight in the different matters. We can help you every step of the way from assessing your current IT/Test organization to implementing suitable automation tooling. As we are vendor independent we can give you objective advise on which tools would(n’t) meet your demands. If nothing really suits your needs there is always the possibility to build your personalized automation framework. At Brightest we believe real quality requires a holistic view. Cost-effective software quality requires more than just testing skills (read more on this topic in our Whitepaper on “How to set up cost-efficient software testing?”). Together with you, we look at the complete picture and focus our efforts on high return on investment.

Written by Frederique De Winter, Senior test automation expert & domain manager