Poor Practices that Damage Efforts of Test Automation

Every upcoming development methodology places considerable importance on testing, which includes Test-Driven Development, Feature-Driven Development, Behavior Driven Development, etc. Although automating tests has prevailed since long time, a number of development organizations still fail to get it right with the process.

Well, the reason can mostly be owed to the inherent bad practices that have been running across the wide range of testing and development methodologies. Here is a quick look at some of the poor practices and useless habits that has been restricting a number of organizations from gaining the real worth and benefits of automation of several software –

• Avoid assuming that test automation is simple and can be taken up by anyone: Since the tools comprise record-and-playback features, it is believed that anyone familiar with the mouse can run successful automation of tests. A part of such belief can be blamed on the high dependency of the industry on the subject criteria more than the objective criteria of the test automation tool. The matter that the appearance must be made easy in terms of just pointing –and–clicking the way to ROI for easy sale of the test automation to the mass is never stated right. Assuming that you can send anyone for automation-training for developing the required expertise is a bad idea. On the contrary, you must take time and put up a team that understands diverse programming concepts and software development process.

• Record-and-Playback: Did you ever think about what makes record-and –playback so popular in the industry? Well, simply because it helps the team feels productive, even though the team is undergoing a futile exercise. Record-and-playback allows your team to design test scripts that can be thrown away. Even if the script fails to work, there is hardly any reason to worry. All you need to do is re-launch the recorder and start the process all over again. Always remember that if test automation had been that easy, the need of its specialists would have never existed.

• Framework Test and Job Security: Having an expert automation specialist is not always a good idea, as there is a disadvantage for the same. Relying on just one person for designing and maintaining a test framework for a team of testers is never a good idea. If you are in the field of software development, you must be aware of the term “spaghetti code”, which involves a complicated control structure. The concern that comes up is who will be maintaining the framework, in case the specialist goes missing from action. It is important for you to design a simple framework that is well-documented and can be maintained easily. This would save the team from losing out on any expertise of the framework.

• Keyword-Driven Testing: So, it is almost understood that automation-testing is not an easy task to accomplish. Building a library of code related to table based functionalities might help the accounting or the QA team to go ahead with the automating process and that too successfully. If you are considering going ahead with the idea of implementing keyword-driven testing, you must always focus on listing the skill set of your team. This particular method works only when the team is blessed with the technical knowledge of maintaining, enhancing, and executing the framework. However, it is not being said that keyword-driven testing is a bad idea. It is not required for the entire team to be involved in the process.

Test automation of software is never an easy task to take up. Designing efficiencies or building expertise into the process of development is a tough task to achieve. However, doing the same mistake continuously will make this topic remain on the cycle of software development. Avoid looking for an ultimate solution to test automation. On the contrary, consider relying upon a realistic and practical approach of building automation library that is robust and can be reused. It is also important for the automation library to provide good ROI.

In such a scenario, to leverage the maximum benefits of automation testing, scouting for a list of automation testing companies is the most helpful. Once you get a list, it would be helpful to understand their expertise in then find an overlap with your needs.

We provide automated regression testing services. If you would like to know more about the expertise of our expert automation testers, please visit Mindfire Solutions.