What are the top techniques for reliable and resilient automated tests in QA automation?

2 Follow the test pyramid

The test pyramid is a concept that illustrates how to balance the different types of automated tests in your test suite. It suggests that you should have more unit tests, fewer integration tests, and even fewer end-to-end tests. Unit tests are the fastest, cheapest, and most reliable tests that verify the functionality of individual components or modules. Integration tests are the tests that check how different components or modules interact with each other or with external systems. End-to-end tests are the tests that simulate the user journey and validate the entire system or application. By following the test pyramid, you can achieve optimal coverage, performance, and feedback from your automated tests.

3 Apply the Page Object Model

The Page Object Model is a design pattern that helps you organize and manage your automated tests for web applications. It involves creating separate classes or objects for each web page or screen in your application, and defining the elements and actions that belong to them. This way, you can abstract the details of the user interface from your test scripts, and make them more modular, readable, and maintainable. The Page Object Model also makes it easier to update your test scripts when there are changes in the user interface, as you only need to modify the corresponding page objects.

4 Implement retry and wait mechanisms

Retry and wait mechanisms are techniques that help you handle the uncertainty and variability of automated tests. Retry mechanisms are the methods that allow you to repeat a failed test or action until it passes or reaches a limit. Wait mechanisms are the methods that allow you to pause or delay a test or action until a certain condition is met or a timeout occurs. These techniques can help you avoid false negatives, flaky tests, and synchronization issues that may arise due to network latency, dynamic elements, or asynchronous operations.

5 Use test data management

Test data management is the practice of creating, storing, and managing the data that you use for your automated tests. It involves defining the data requirements, generating or obtaining the data, ensuring the data quality and validity, and protecting the data security and privacy. Test data management can help you improve the reliability and resilience of your automated tests by providing consistent, realistic, and diverse data sets that cover different scenarios and edge cases. It can also help you reduce the data duplication, corruption, and dependency that may affect your test results.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?