Test Automation Top Secrets - Checklist for your Business Decisions

Roughly agree to that .. one item is often forgotten? :? Select a Test Automation SOLUTION which support your business and ROI only. Not to support BA, Dev, QA

Do you think there are difficult scenarios that your tool can't handle ? Are you planning to remove those tests from your Suite ? Re-think try the scenarios using #smartbear #testcomplete & #eggplant

#tricentis #smartbear #eggplant

Krishna Reddy Manubolu, Kiran Kumar Gopal

A great discussion but... it prompted several reactions in me as I read it. 1.Automation will save Money It will over the long-term otherwise we shouldn’t bother. The up-front costs are significant but over the life of the product, it should save money. 2. Automation will reduce the number of manual resources. Perhaps not reduce the number of manual resources but it will focus their efforts on the complex type of testing that are too costly to develop and maintain. 3. Automation will make Return on Investment better. See #1; if automation does not improve the ROI we should not do it. Automation for the sake of automation is illogical. 4. Will automate all the cases. Anyone who believes we can / should automate every test case doesn’t really understand testing or #1, #3. 5. Automation is a one time investment. Automation is software development and unless the application being tested is static your automation will require maintenance and enhancements to keep pace. 6. Using an OpenSource automation tool will save money. This one is more nuanced for me. I think of this the same way I think of the build vs buy decision when building an application. Do I buy a CMS solution or build one? I personally favor an open-source approach but that is a personal bias and I think each organization has to perform their own due diligence before making that decision. Remember : Only a few comments here - 1. Reporting, the costly investment Not sure I agree 100% on this. The open-source ecosystem has become very robust and chances are there are reporting tools readily available. Additionally, often there are already commercial reporting tools deployed in the organization by the BI or DevOps teams that can be leveraged. 2. OpenSource saves only the tool cost, Which adds cost on reporting, maintenance, Resource etc. Don’t forget the ongoing annual support and licensing fees. Secrets: 1. Most of the Paid tools gives better ROI. By default Framework, Reporting, Technical support, Resource knowledge, Standard documentation and forums. In my opinion, this is an oversimplified conclusion and I don’t believe it is an obvious truism. I know the tool vendors want you to think this is the case but unless company is willing to run both COTS and an Open-Source solutions in parallel it is in my mind unprovable. 2. There are Scriptless test automation tools which prevents Scripts maintenance time. In my experience, scriptless tools are great to get a start, think Selenium IDE but very soon most organizations realize the limitations. 3. Test Maintenance is lesser and easier in paid tools. Again, I don’t necessarily agree with this, particularly when you are up against a limitation or bug in the tool itself. If it is your own implementation of an open source tool, you are free to fix it immediately. 4. Test Automation selects their Scripting or coding language based on Testers and tool not which developers use. In my personal view, “going native” with your testing is a good thing. Having tests and test frameworks built in the language and tech stack of the application when possible has several benefits including the ability to leverage the development team if needed at times.