Planning for Automation Testing

Aug. 27, 2012 - PRLog -- The process of automated testing requires accurate planning. An efficient automation plan provides for looking and analyzing ahead.

Writing of the test automation may take place after some time from the project start. So check that the client configuration as well as all setup steps are as simple as possible and are thoroughly documented. Such approach will save you more time and effort than you think. If a software testing company hires a new member, several days of setting up and examining the system should be enough to be brought up to date and to start writing automation tests.

Some software testing companies prefer to have one or two individuals responsible for automation. Others prefer to give the responsibility to every individual. The process of automation testing should improve the tester's understanding of the implementations and the feature areas, improving testing practices first and programming second. It totally depends upon the wishes of every team member concerning the approach to the current project.

Automation testing is known for its fragile nature. It greatly depends upon the constancy of the project. The smallest product variations may waste hours of work.  The workers of a software testing company have to be aware of all product changes so that they could prepare themselves for the reports of the tests fails and for the fixes to be implemented.
On one hand making scripts small and atomic allows to test only one function at a time. On the other hand it makes possible to combine several scripts to accomplish larger tasks. Also if there is some change in the functionality, a tester should just update some of these atomic scripts that compose the larger ones. One atomic case that was broken may be referenced in other large scripts. So fixing one atomic script fixes all huge dependent scripts.

Planning for the next release is necessary, but software testing company has to be cautious with such planning. Thinking ahead is important and planning to use the scripts as they are in the next release seems forward-looking. But every software testing company should take into consideration the possible future changes in the product and that it won’t be so easy to maintain the current scripts. Though it doesn’t mean that all results of the whole persistent work cannot be used in future releases, they will just have to be updated. Take into consideration the short lifetime of the automation and its dependence on the product code stability.

Externalizing and compartmentalizing all of the strings, graphics, and inputs as variables stored outside the actual cases will make maintenance easier and will allow more updates in the smaller amount of time.