Test automation is being increasingly adopted by a majority of software companies, but still, there are some places where there are reservations as to how much value test automation will provide. Most of the confusion stems from the fact that not all people in an organization, especially those who take decisions find test automation a worthy investment.
Another aspect of the same problem is that although everyone involved with the development of a project has been involved in manual testing at some level when it comes to automation, they often find themselves out of place. Hopefully, by the end of this article, we will be in a better position to solve both the problems.
Current Practices
A typical day in the life of an Agile Software development team that has also invested in test automation looks like this:
- Developer checks in some code
- The code is built
- The set of automated cases run after the code is built
- If the test cases run successfully the code is deployed, if not the cycle continues
In parallel with Software Development, there is the Quality Assurance team who either write manual test cases of features that are yet to be checked in or write automation scripts. Sometimes, there are test cases that fail during the 3rd step and, the reason could be a bug in the code or a change in the feature, which makes it necessary to change the test case.
Contribution From Different Resources
Black-Box Automation is done by the Quality Assurance people who have special skills to do these tasks. The contribution from Developers is in the form of unit tests and white box test cases that they add to test their own code.
Test Automation by Functional Experts and SMEs is particularly important in Agile/CD cycles.The Product Manager, Program Manager or Project Managers that are involved in business specifications gathering and handling the client end, receive and review the emails of the test results and any other analysis reports on the test.
Although Product/Project Managers are the ones that interact with the customers, their involvement in the test automation phase is not much. Even though Managers can review the manual test case documentation, reviewing automated test cases is not their cup of tea.
Once the feature becomes old, there is a big chance that the important scenarios that were run by the stakeholders may not be tested again after release. There is a high possibility that a new check-in for a new feature may break these important scenarios or some edge cases and they go unnoticed till the time it is found by the end user. Embarrassing right? What if there was a test automation tool that would enable the stakeholders to add these test cases for test automation by themselves? Testsigma sure is one such test automation tool.
What Is Needed?
Although there is a process set in to transfer all the requirements that come from the client to the developers and the testers. In all the processes involved and the time invested during the design, development and testing phase, a lot more intricacies are added to the product that needs to be taken care of both my developers and the testers. Thus, before the release time, the involvement of a person who has first-hand knowledge from the customer who has not been involved in the details of design and development gives unique insight to the product and how well it caters to the business requirements.
To make sure that the automation actually covers the business requirements, the reviews and inputs from the Product/Project Managers are vital. For ensuring that the developed features are fully tested via automation, the reviews by developers are essential too. The best possible way would be to enable a person who is not well versed with the automation world to review the automated test cases and if possible to easily automate the scenarios that they deem important. This way two purposes would be fulfilled:
- The most important test scenarios would be automated
- The automation team would get more time to work on the intricacies of automation. Giving them the time and opportunity to also include complex test cases to the test suite and more time for maintenance and increasing the robustness of the test cases.
What Do New Improvements In Test Automation Industry Entail?
Artificial Intelligence(AI) is the new technology trend that is being adopted by most industries as is by the Software Industry. What the test automation industry needs is a new tool that can enable all the stakeholders of a software/project to create automatable test cases with a minimum learning curve.
Testsigma is one such tool that is set to revolutionize the test automation industry because it uses AI as its core. Test Cases need to be written only in simple English and once the test cases are execution ready they learn and adapt to new changes and make maintenance easier with the help of AI.
What Are The Benefits Of Using Test Automation Tools That Use New Technologies And Techniques?
If such tools are used it will not only lead to a gentler learning curve for quality assurance engineers to write and maintain the test cases but will also give the opportunity to project managers and clients to add test cases where needed. If other stakeholders can add and review the automated test cases, the test suite is sure to cover the most important scenarios before the product hits the market and will lead to lesser number of bugs.
How Will The Adoption Of New Tools Lead To Test Automation Becoming More Inclusive?
Enabling other stakeholders to review and automate test cases serves more than one purpose. It will lead to more test cases and better code coverage. It will also lead to a better understanding of the process and needs of test automation. Better understanding also means better adoption. Thus, using a Unified Test Automation Tool like Testsigma which has the capability of adding test cases in simple English and learns to maintain the test cases via AI is need of the hour and answer to the need to make test automation more inclusive.
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