Test Automation versus Quality Automation

It may not be apparent that there is a difference between test automation and quality automation, much like the difference between testing and quality assurance. And, unless one happens to work in the test automation field, it's likely one doesn't give much thought to this, so I'd like to take a moment and develop this thought.

Testing is one of the fundamentals of quality assurance, this may be obvious, and as the software under test grows, automated tests are developed as part of the quality assurance process and, at this stage, two things may happen, equally plausible.

In the first case, there may be a decrease in quality because while there are automated test cases to cover some scenarios, their high-level approach may ignore aspects of quality that were either difficult to implement, or ignored altogether. This happens when translating test cases per se, without ever returning to the fundamentals:

• Are we automatically testing the right stuff?
• Are we automatically testing the stuff right?

It's easy to fall for this trap, writing test code that works, without even considering that while manual tests are written in a certain quality assurance spirit, during their migration to automation, some aspects of quality may get lost.

In the second case, being aware that while performing the migration from manual tests to atomic tests and then automated tests, there is a risk of losing quality, the proper test complexity can be added to automated tests so that the decrease in quality becomes marginal.

So, to sum it up, quality automation is a stance of test automation where there is a strong and willful focus on preserving test quality while doing test automation.