Test Automation: Best Practices Playbook

In this playbook, we explore best practices across 9 important areas in the test automation life cycle.

In today's software development life cycle, adopting best practices in test automation isn't merely advantageous—it's essential for success. Neglecting these best practices can lead to inefficiencies in QA efforts, potentially resulting in products that do not meet user expectations or business needs.

This guide delves into industry-standard best practices across the entire test life cycle, empowering you to establish and maintain efficient and robust automation programs. Covering crucial areas such as Test Strategy, AI, Test Development, Debugging, CI/CD, Training, and Tooling, this comprehensive article aims to provide valuable insights and practical advice for optimizing your testing projects. We hope you find it helpful and insightful.

1. Test Automation Strategy: Best Practices

• Test the real user behavior

Automated tests should verify that the application functions as intended for end users, based on business requirements, without relying on implementation details that users won't typically interact with, such as function names, data structures, or CSS classes. Since end users interact with the rendered output on the page, your tests should focus on verifying that same rendered output.

• Testing the Integrations

Clearly define how integration points between applications will be tested, and establish specific test cases to validate these integration points. Ensure agreement on these test cases among all stakeholders. Additionally, using realistic test data and automating tests can enhance accuracy and efficiency.

• Clear Documentation

Keep thorough documentation of your tests, including their scope, setup, and expected outcomes, to facilitate the maintenance and onboarding of new team members.

• Create tests as independent as possible

Each test should be completely isolated from another test and should run independently with its own local execution storage, session details, data, cookies, etc.?Test Isolation?improves reproducibility, makes debugging easier, and prevents cascading test failures.

• Monitor and Review Test Strategy Regularly:

Regularly review and update your test strategy to adapt to changes in your application, dependencies, and business requirements, ensuring it remains relevant and effective.

2. AI-Powered Testing Projects: Best Practices

No topic in test automation is complete without AI in the context of the last couple of years. Because, AI is crucial in test automation due to its ability to enhance efficiency, accuracy, and coverage. It can intelligently generate and prioritize test cases, identify potential defects, and adapt to changes in the application, reducing the need for manual intervention. Here are some of the best practices in leveraging AI capabilities to the full extent.

• Choose right tooling

Carefully evaluate this tooling on these parameters – Infra, integrations with external AI models, Security, and Scalability.

• Ease of Use & Learning Curve

User-friendly interfaces and intuitive workflows are essential, especially for teams new to AI-driven testing. The tool should facilitate quick onboarding and minimize the learning curve for testers and developers.

• Context Grounding & Prompt Engineering

Please be sure to look for tools that allow prompt libraries for customization of test scripts, reporting formats, and integration with custom libraries or frameworks. Flexibility ensures the tool can adapt to your specific testing requirements and methodologies.

• Cost and ROI:

Evaluate the total cost of ownership, including licensing fees, training costs, and ongoing maintenance. Consider the tool’s potential ROI through increased efficiency, reduced testing time, and improved software quality.

• Cloud-Native:

Ensure the AI capabilities are implemented using modern cloud-powered architecture. Because, leveraging cloud capabilities for AI-powered testing enhances scalability, resource efficiency, collaboration, cost-effectiveness, integration with DevOps, and access to advanced AI services, and ensures robust security and compliance standards, making it a compelling choice for modern software development and testing initiatives.

3. Test Automation Development: Best Practices

• Simpler Tests with less duplicates – Modular/ Hooks/ Templates

To avoid repetition for a particular part of your test you can use?Hooks, Templates, or modular test cases.

For example, within your test scenario add a hook/template to run a part of your test before each test such as going to a particular URL or logging in to a part of your app. This keeps your tests isolated as no test relies on another. However, it is also ok to have a little duplication when tests are simple enough especially if it keeps your tests clearer and easier to read and maintain.

You can also reuse the signed-in state in the tests with?context-setup tests. That way you can log in only once and then skip the login step for all of the tests.

• Limit Testing third-party dependencies

Focus your testing efforts on what you can control. Avoid automating links to external sites in reusable test cases. Testing external links can be time-consuming, slowing down your tests, and you cannot control the content of linked pages, including factors like cookie banners or overlays that could cause test failures. Keep external link checks as independent test cases to ensure reliable and predictable test outcomes.

• Database Testing

When working with a database, ensure you have control over the data. Test against a staging environment to maintain data consistency.

• Visual Testing

For visual tests, ensure uniformity by using the identical operating system and browser versions across testing environments.

• Object Identification (Use reliable locators)

When preparing to write end-to-end tests, the first step is to locate elements within the application (e.g., webpage or SAP). Automation tools offer various tools for inspecting these elements and understanding their structure and unique identifiers, known as locators, attributes, or selectors. These locators include features like auto-waiting and retry capability. Auto-waiting ensures that execution verifies elements for actionability, such as visibility and enabling, before executing actions like clicks. To enhance test resilience, prioritize using attributes that are user-facing and establish clear, explicit contracts.

• Prefer reliable locators to XPATH or CSS selectors

Relying on the DOM structure for your tests can make them vulnerable to failure due to their potential to change. For instance, if you select a button based solely on its CSS classes, any design updates could alter those classes, resulting in test failures. It's essential to use stable and reliable selectors that are less prone to changes to maintain the robustness of your tests over time.

• Use Standard Assertions

Assertions are a way to verify that the expected result and the actual result are matched or not. By using?standard assertions, you ensure automation will wait until the expected condition is met. For example, when testing an alert message, a test would click a button that makes a message appear and check that the alert message is there. If the alert message takes half a second to appear, assertions will wait and retry if needed.

• Avoid Hard Waits ()

Don't use hard coded Waits as they wait for a fixed amount of time irrespective of the application state. Hence, it is effective only in smaller tests but is highly inefficient in almost all testing projects.

• Test across Browsers

Testing across all browsers ensures your app works for all users. In your config file, you can set up projects by adding the name and which browser or device to use.

4. Test Debugging: Best Practices

• Enforce quality reviews (Automate reviews where possible)

Ensure automated test scenarios pass successfully in consecutive runs (e.g., at least 3 times) before deploying to the execution environment.

Use Step-Into, Step-Over, or Step-Through functionalities for efficient debugging when encountering failures.

• Debugging in CI/CD environments

For CI failures, use screenshots or videos for functional failures & Use the Trace or Logs for operational failures

5. Automation Tools & Awareness: Best Practices

Every automation tool offers a variety of capabilities to facilitate the management of test automation projects. While specific feature names may differ between tools, their purposes remain consistent. Most automation tools include these features, with modern ones often offering enhanced user experience and consolidated functionalities.?Ensure your team understands these and how to leverage them.

• The IDE?(automated test authoring tool) gives you a developer experience when writing, running, and debugging tests. Ensure you choose the one that offers Ease-Of-Use.
• Leverage UI/ Application Explorer that can generate tests and pick locators for you.
• The Log Viewer?gives you a full trace of your tests as a local file or shared asset that can easily be shared.
• The Test Explorer?lets you explore, run, and debug tests with watch mode.
• Extensibility will help you with pre-built libraries and their maintenance for better scalability. Look for ways you could bring in your own functions to extend standard test automation tools. Eg: Market Place, Plug-in Libraries, etc.,
• Version Controlling: It helps you manage changes effectively and promote reusability across the teams.??

6. Test Execution: Best Practices

• Set up CI/CD pipelines and execute tests regularly. Frequent testing improves reliability. Aim to run tests with each commit and pull request, especially on agile projects. Automation tools often include built-in plugins or integration options for seamless CI/CD integration.
• For Regression test projects, use time-scheduled orchestration capabilities.
• For Enterprise Application testing (eg: SAP, Oracle, Workday, etc.,), use time-scheduled/ Data-scheduled orchestrations.
• For optimal scalability, consider script-less automation tools. They simplify integration processes, enhance parallel execution capabilities, and make scalability straightforward.

By default, consider running your tests in parallel. Normally, tests within a single file or test set execute sequentially within the same worker process. However, if you have numerous independent tests within a single file, running them concurrently can significantly improve efficiency.

7. Team Training & Enablement: Best Practices

• Keep your automation tools up to date by installing the latest libraries and templates.
• Understand release frequency on your tools and be sure to check the release notes
• Connect with the tooling vendor for training and enablement. All of these vendors provide standard training free of cost. Encourage your teams on regular training programs like quarterly training.
• Keep a comprehensive training plan ready for new joiners as part of onboarding.
• Encourage teams with constructive debates on test automation standards/ industry trends/ Artificial Intelligence
• Encourage teams to be part of community groups organized by tool vendors. Such involvement enhances learning about test automation, providing valuable insights into a wide range of use cases and best practices.

8. Test Automation Architecture: Best Practices

• Modularity and Reusability: Set up the modularity and reusability framework in the test strategy document.
• Cross Platform and Environments Testing: Ensure comprehensive application test coverage by including browser, device, and platform details as part of the test strategy.
• Integration Capabilities: Ensure Test Automation tools can integrate with various other critical teams in the enterprise and gain insights on critical operational KPIs – ALM, Reporting, Analytics, Performance Monitoring, License Usage, Subscription Usage monitoring, AI filtering/governance capabilities.
• Scalability and Performance: ?Ensure the architecture of tools and processes is scalable to accommodate large test suites and growing testing needs. It should also deliver efficient performance to execute tests quickly and reliably, especially when dealing with complex applications or high-volume testing scenarios.
• Reporting & Analytics:? Ensure you use automation to generate clear, actionable insights based on test results, trends, and quality metrics.

9. Testing Productivity: General Best Practices

• Use Soft Assertions for better reporting

If your test fails, automation tools will give you an error message showing what part of the test failed which you can see either in standard log files, the HTML report, or the trace viewer. However, you can also use?soft assertions. These do not immediately terminate the test execution but rather compile and display a list of failed assertions once the test ends.

• Ensure Quality across test cases and tests

Ensure automated governance and quality review processes are in place for validating the standards of test automation.

Ensure every test scenario is executed successfully at least 3 times in a row using an execution orchestrator (or scheduler). This will help you catch up on any system dependency issues and be able to fix them in the Debugging phase.

In essence, adhering to best practices in test automation projects not only enhances the quality and reliability of testing but also contributes to the overall success of software development initiatives.