How can you ensure your automated tests are accessible to all team members?

This is very important. Whenever applicable, develop an automation framework inside your development project using native tools. For example, for your iOS project, use XCUI and Swift. For Android, use Kotlin or Java with Espresso. For Frontend, use Cypress. When your automation lives in the same project with native tools, you bolster its capabilities and also ensure wide participation from everybody.

Use a user-friendly test automation framework. Provide comprehensive documentation and training. Encourage collaboration and knowledge sharing. Maintain a version-controlled test repository. Conduct regular code reviews and pair programming. Ensure tests are well-documented and self-explanatory. Use continuous integration for test execution and reporting. Consider diverse team members' accessibility needs.

By following a proper version control mechanism and a branch strategy, access to the tests should not be a concern any longer. Question should be, who needs access to these tests? For dev, it could be to test their changes and the confusion would be 1. which tests to run 2. How to execute them. Both of these can be solved with a robust CI/CD process and with in CI/CD pipeline ensure component to test code mapping and by using GIT actions it is also possible to just run the tests that are mapped to changed code part. Now for Test Engineers, they need to understand what and how tests are automated by following good coding standards, appropriate logging and documentation mechanisms. Depending on code base, containerizing automation may help.

In QA automation, employing a common framework streamlines testing by promoting reusability, ensuring consistency, and facilitating scalability. This structured foundation enhances efficiency and maintenance while fostering collaboration among team members.

To make sure that your automated tests are accessible to all team members, involve everyone from the beginning, use clear test names, provide documentation, encourage code reviews, utilize version control, integrate tests with continuous integration, set up an accessibility lab, offer training, and use accessibility testing tools. This way, everyone on the team can easily understand and participate in the test automation process.

To follow naming and coding standards is really good. But it can also be easier said then done. So if you can find ways to enforce these rules with for instance a linting tool in your code editor and also combine it with running the same linting rules when you push changes to your version control system, then it will be even better.

Learning how to use instruments that help us follow standards is one of the important parts of us becoming closer to the developers. Using tools, e.g. linters and style-enforcers, is crucial to make sure everyone writes similar code for the ease of the reviews and decrease our chances of creating a bug in our code.

I would strongly recommend to have separated document or guide . It doesn't matter how you name , but it should be especially when a few spread teams are involved in the same project or if it's remote team. The document may include different levels description. All involved persons have different experience and habits and can bring smth new to your project. So, I would spend more time to get together and brain storm under the common rules and rights than correct the same issues during every merge requests. Later, it will be a great help for new commers as well for anyone on the project. This document should regularly reviewed and updated in order to have actual state. Merge requests can be like a control checks to follow the document.

To enhance accessibility for automated tests, adhere to consistent naming and coding standards. Use descriptive names for test files, classes, methods, and variables to clarify their purpose and logic. Avoid abbreviations and magic numbers. Additionally, utilize comments, annotations, and assertions to document test logic, inputs, outputs, and expectations, making your tests more readable and maintainable.

I may times see good benefits in adding the test level in the file name of the test file. It's common to do that for unit test files like this "name-of-test-file.test.ts", but you can do that for all of your test levels, like for example you can name you integration test like this "name-of-test-file.itest.ts". One of the good benefits of this is that it's very easy to search all integration tests wherever they are located in your file structure.

To enhance the accessibility of automated tests, organize and categorize them by levels, types, features, and dependencies. Group tests logically to avoid duplication and identify gaps or overlaps. Use folders, packages, tags, or attributes to separate unit, integration, and system tests, as well as to mark smoke, regression, and performance tests. Additionally, use prefixes, suffixes, or keywords to indicate the features, modules, or components covered by or dependent on each test.

Unfortunatly we are are driven by the 'desire' of a customer instead of customer's 'pain points' and 'needs'. We often undermine qualitative meta requirment of user and? focus on a quantative? requirment of our own ( few similarities with orginal requirments) which suppress the actual. Unfortunatly our test case and automation suite are driven by those. I feel it is? perenneial for perfect test coverage is to do proper user research and update your test case w.r.t TIME. Else you will have a weak test coverage or a case of strong pesticide paradox.

In my opinion simply generating a report is not always enough or at least not super convenient. Why - because it takes a lot of time to go through the logs with all the retries and whatnots. That's where a more complicated reporting, like Allure, comes handy. Adding test steps in plain English allows much faster debugging and search for an error in our code. As a bonus it can serve as test documentation if you have no time to write it.

Yes, it's pretty convenient to have automated tests results after tests running. All who are interested can see results regularly on email. Usually test engineers are interested in test results or team leads in order to analyze and proceed them. Clients or customers are faster interested in specific metrics which can be derived from the tests results. For example fail rate, defect efficiency and so on.

To further enhance the accessibility of automated tests, automate and document test execution. Automation ensures reliable, efficient, and consistent test runs, and integrates with continuous integration and delivery pipelines. Documenting test execution helps record and report results, status, and metrics, aiding in troubleshooting and analysis. Tools like JUnit, TestNG, or NUnit can automate and document test execution, providing detailed reports in various formats.

Yes, Create clear and comprehensive documentation for your automated tests. Include information about the purpose of the tests, how to run them, and how to interpret the results. This documentation should be well-organized and easily accessible to team members.

Completely agree. Test results should be regularly reviewed and gapped against regulatory requirements to ensure adherence. Regular feedback should be sought and implemented to ensure continuous improvement.

One thing that I can share is to do pair peer review of codes. This will solidify how the overall accountability of the team when it comes to code standard

It is an integral part of any software development process. It could be as useful feedback or studying process or following common rules. I like the process since it helps to find some discrepancies and come to common decision.

Using the suggested tools are good for learning purposes. Learning for other people is also a good way to learn new things and improve. Using mob-programming when developing and testing your program, is a great way learn a lot and fast from your team members. Note there should be QA people in your mob also.

If a project is in an active phase and you actively develop automated tests you can organize meetings to share some approaches for non trivial task. Sometimes, if a project is pretty big , it helps you to not reinvent a wheel but use tested approach. It could be any form of communication but ,as result your teammates will be aware about the ready solution.

Choose a widely understood framework or language, like Python and Pytest, making it accessible to less technical team members. Document the purpose, steps, and expected results of each test for easy understanding by anyone. Use Git for version control, all team members will be able to access and update tests. Implement a CI (e.g., Jenkins, GitLab CI, etc) to automatically run tests and display results in a web interface. Provide training on writing, running, and interpreting test results, check that all team members have the needed skills. Implement a code review process for tests to ensure that team members understand them. The objective is to enable everyone on the team to understand tests and contribute to product quality.

Purpose of Automation: I think the first step even before the tool or framework is to define the purpose. Is it gonna do functional tests, API tests, Visual Tests and used for Unit Testing or UAT Testing or Integration and those also would be a part of regression suite or a smoke suite. Once the purpose is defined it is easy to get the specific team members onboard who excel at different specialties & a single framework could then be used across the board by categorization as not everything would be relevant to everyone and learning curve is also an important parameter

I agree, main point to flag it is to write your testing scenarios in clear , straightforward & logic way which can let your other team mates understand your report and on the other hand having a unified form & way of writing can help to make it easy for your team

This can be achieved by developing the mindset in the team that Quality is a shared responsibility. If possible, right from the beginning of a project, including every QA (irrespective of them having Manual or Automation skill sets) and most importantly Developers in the team along with the Tech Lead persona in every aspect of f/w building, pipeline design, tool selections, pipeline security, branching strategies etc. Involving a Client tech persona in such meetings would be great too, if possible. While a QA should own and develop f/w's, processes, this way the mindset of maintaining and being responsible for a f/w becomes a team's ownership as a whole and every member (including Devs) would maintain/improve/ access the f/w organically.

Using a test automation platform like the old Test Project or Tosca is one of the better ways to manage the testing of a system. You get everything that is being suggested by the AI in this article: - common framework - naming standards for artifacts - organization and categorization of tests - automation and documentation of tests With the added benefit that the process is already instituted within the UI making it easier, from a governance perspective, to both guide the above as well as ensure that everyone has access to all the latest automation information for the project.