How can you align your QA automation with overall software quality goals?

1 Define your quality goals and metrics

Before you start automating your tests, it is important to have a shared understanding of what quality means for your software and how you will measure it. Quality goals and metrics should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). Additionally, they should be aligned with the business value, user expectations, and functional and non-functional requirements of your software. For instance, reducing the number of defects by 50% in six months, achieving 90% test coverage for critical features in each sprint, improving the user satisfaction score by 10 points in three months, or ensuring that the software meets the performance, security, and accessibility standards are all examples of quality goals and metrics.

2 Choose the right automation tools and frameworks

When selecting automation tools and frameworks to meet your software quality goals and metrics, there are several factors to consider, such as the type, complexity, and scope of your software and its features, the compatibility, integration, and scalability of the automation tools and frameworks with your software and its technologies, the availability, cost, and maintenance of the automation tools and frameworks, as well as the skills, experience, and preferences of your QA team and developers. Additionally, you should be aware of the features, functionalities, and limitations of the automation tools and frameworks. Examples of popular automation tools and frameworks include Selenium for web automation, Appium for mobile automation, JUnit for unit testing, Cucumber for behavior-driven testing, Jenkins for continuous integration and delivery.

3 Design and implement your automation strategy

Once you have your quality goals and metrics and your automation tools and frameworks, you need to design and implement your automation strategy. This strategy should include the scope, level, and frequency of automation; the test cases, scenarios, and data to be automated; the standards, guidelines, and best practices to be followed; the roles and responsibilities of the QA team and developers; and the reporting, monitoring, and feedback mechanisms to be used. Additionally, it should adhere to the principles of test automation pyramid which suggests having more unit tests, fewer integration tests, and even fewer end-to-end tests for faster feedback, lower maintenance, and higher reliability.

4 Evaluate and optimize your automation results

The final step is to evaluate and optimize your automation results based on your quality goals and metrics. You can track and analyze the performance, quality, and value of your automation using dashboards, charts, reports, code analysis, reviews, refactoring, test automation metrics, feedback loops, retrospectives, and surveys. Additionally, you should identify and address challenges and issues in your automation such as flaky tests, technical constraints, changing requirements, or skill gaps. All of these will help ensure the reliability and accuracy of your automation as well as its scope, scalability, complexity, maintenance, collaboration, and alignment.

5 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?