A Dummy’s Guide to Automated Testing

Background

I’ve been working closely with the Research and Development, Operations, and Testing teams at large-scale enterprise software providers. At first, I mainly focused on adopting containers and Kubernetes. But over time, I've built partnerships with leaders and tech experts in the organisations, from the teams that find and hire new employees to the teams that test, deploy, and manage change.

Thanks to these strong relationships, my hands-on involvement in current projects, and my extensive experience in the enterprise, I’ve gained a deep understanding of the challenges businesses face as they work towards transforming into a fully-auto-tested modern technology enterprise. In this article, I'll try to sum up the things to think about when automating testing in the enterprise.

What is Test Automation?

Test automation is a software testing technique that is done using automated software tools. In contrast, manual testing is performed by a human engineer executing the test steps carefully on a computer.

Test automation provides substantial benefits over manual testing. For instance, it can improve the ROI for testing significantly. The ROI increase is due to test automation’s capability to record a test suite and replay that suite as required. With such replayability, test automation largely reduces the number of test cases that need to be run manually. Moreover, it unlocks the ability to integrate and deploy code quickly and reliably to development and production environments, thus increasing velocity.

Why Test Automation?

Test Automation is the single best way to increase the speed of software testing. In addition to the speed, it also increases the efficacy, coverage and the execution speed of testing.

Typically, I advise organizations that they should adopt it and that it should be prioritized because (and when):

• Manual testing consumes a large amount of time, resources and money to test all workflows, fields and negative scenarios.
• Automated integration and functional testing enables the organization to continuously integrate and deploy code — and they need to go through fast iterations.
• Testing multilingual sites manually is difficult.
• Test automation will significantly decrease the test execution time.
• It will significantly increase the coverage of testing and quality.
• The monotonous nature of manual testing makes testing prone to more errors.

To get organisations on track with automated tests at any scale — I always follow this framework:

1. Selecting appropriate testing tools.
2. Defining the scope of automation testing.
3. Planning, design and development of the automated testing process.
4. Executing the testing process.
5. Constant maintenance.

Benefits of Automated Testing

Test automation can bring invaluable benefits to the software development process. Below are a few key benefits:

1. Achieve a Faster Feedback Cycle With the implementation of test automation, you will be able to get faster feedback for the new features as they are being released. When you use manual testing, the feedback time tends to be a lot longer. Test automation enables you to detect defects in your code early, so your development efficiency becomes much higher as well.
2. Reduce Business Expenditure Although installing and setting up an automated testing environment takes time and resources upfront, the cost reductions you’d enjoy over time will be significant.
3. Faster Time to Market As test automation makes it possible to test and validate with increased efficiency and speed, the reduced feedback and testing cycle will enable you to deliver software faster to your customers.
4. Reduced Strain on Your QA Teams Practicing automated testing frees up your QA team to spend more time on other tasks such as adding new features rather than spending that time on manual testing.

Another added benefit for the QA team is that the ability to engage in test automation becomes beneficial for their own careers as test automation skills happen to be on demand. Ultimately, your QA team will become more productive, efficient and optimized with the introduction of test automation.

Best Practices on Test Automation

As discussed so far, the adoption of test automation provides overwhelmingly positive benefits. However, if not implemented or balanced appropriately, testing automation does have a tendency to throw the development lifecycle out of balance.

It can be said that the automation of builds, tests and deployments and the introduction of observability are all beneficial to the health of the software release process — albeit only in moderation. For example, you will be able to replace most UI tests that are functional with automation; however, you will still experience a need for a degree of manual user acceptance testing (UAT) and human feedback.

If you rely too heavily on test automation, especially at inopportune moments and for wrong reasons, your development lifecycle will get affected negatively, pushing your business agility out of balance.

Test Automation for its own sake can be risky.

Testing is an absolute staple in the development lifecycle. Without testing, there will be no method to assess whether a piece of software meets all its requirements.

So far It is evident that in an agile software development lifecycle, automated testing is a must. However, you need to avoid certain pitfalls in your testing approach to ensure everything remains in balance.

Below are a few common pitfalls that you must avoid:

• Not aligning testing with customer expectations: It is important to always align the goals of the test automation process with the customer’s expectations. Failure to tie in business requirements and customer requirements to the test automation process could result in wasted labor and time.
• Having a false sense of security: A common habit testing teams can fall into is focusing too much on high-volume testing and feeling complacent when a large number of tests have been passed. It should be noted that passed tests at any stage will not guarantee improved user experience or guarantee optimum coverage for a large application portfolio.
• Unwillingness to change: If a testing strategy is not geared to cater for change, its effectiveness in test automation gets diminished. Unreliable tests that can’t survive changes can produce a large number of false positives and negatives resulting in a slow delivery process.
• Bloated testing and burn: Another common habit testing teams can fall into is the creation of easy tests and slight variations of existing ones, leading to the creation of a large number of redundant tests. As redundant tests tend to be hard to trace, time is spent recreating tests as it is assumed that defects detected are results of bad tests rather than of a faulty application.

The redundancy described above can lead to increased strain on testers, increased costs and slower delivery times.

Best Practices to Achieve Optimum Testing Automation

As discussed above, although there is a tendency for teams to fall into suboptimal test automation practices, employing the best practices in test automation will enable you to successfully achieve your testing objectives.

The three key best practices that can be employed can be listed as follows:

• Testing at the correct moment Automated testing can be added to practically every stage of the software development life cycle. However, doing so can lead to having “too much” of automated testing. As discussed above, having too much testing can lead to an imbalanced process of software development. To avoid imbalances and to have a seamlessly functioning development life cycle, I recommend adding automation testing to stages in the life cycle that are likely to provide the most business value.
• Testing at the correct places It’s important to implement automation testing at critical stages of the development life cycle which poses risks. For instance, common areas which are critical can be the User Interface, APIs and microservices. By adding tests to the right places, you increase the flexibility and ensure safety in the testing process.
• Allocating the correct resources To get the best out of your QA resources and thus test automation, it’s important to give every support you can give to your QA resources so that they remain productive. You can do this by creating a culture that helps teams by encouraging professional development, education and skill development while also balancing that with organization structure, procedures and correct tools.

Characteristics of a Successful Testing Automation Process

• Speedy Feedback Cycles?— Establishing a high-responsive testing environment will enable you to debug defects and locate root causes for development issues without the burden of context switching.
• Requirements Automation?— In our quest of switching testing to the left, starting to test the test requirements themselves will give you the ability to identify and drop tests that have less relevance and business value, thus saving you costs and time.
• Service Virtualisation?— Service Virtualisation (SV) will allow you to capture, configure and simulate systems virtually. Achieving SV will enable you to have more consistent test results as virtualisation makes it possible to test edge cases more effectively while making it easier to predict the ideal state of a solution more reliably.
• Self-Service Automation?— When you set up your testing teams to be self-serviceable, they’ll be able to significantly reduce cycle times and overhead costs. They’re able to do so because, when teams are self-reliant, they do not have to rely on external teams such as IT support for resources.
• AI-Assisted Automation?— The next-step in automation testing is AI-assisted automation. AI-driven testing methods are able to identify on-screen elements and predict how humans will interact with those elements. When you incorporate AI-assisted automation to your testing process, you’re bound to see fast-feedback and a much smoother testing process.

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