Common Mistakes in Test Automation and How to Avoid Them

Let’s imagine the situation that you have a big DevOps team, professional automated engineers, a lot of licenses, and modern equipment. But most importantly, your management agrees with your opinion that automation is a good thing and it is worth using it on your projects!

How can something go wrong there? Since you and all your assistants are convinced that the automation plan is bound to succeed.

Unfortunately, a company like this is very rare. Hence, if you happen to be in such a situation, you can easily get a little confused about how much you can (and want) to do and what goals to achieve.

But what is much less rare – a few days before the final release to find out that all the problems and project issues are collected in one task and its name is automated test creation.

Software test automation

Problems of Automation Testing Process

Unfortunately, most companies don’t change their attitude to the test automation process for a long time (and this is despite the significant progress in the area of web tools and technologies). Many still think that it is ok to postpone automation and work on it only when there are no more important tasks.

In fact, it is important to take the automation process as a separate part of existing projects. Of course, not every QA team can afford a group of professional automated test engineers. But your team should have enough effort and patience to work on all the manager’s tasks.

A Couple Tips

If you want to plan your tasks on automation correctly and effectively, you should take into account the following:

1. No matter what automation tool you use. You should always create a new system environment for automation tasks on a new project.
   Perform the decomposition process, create stories, tasks, and epics for future tests. Divide tasks into sprints with the specific objective that you need to achieve. Hence, it will be easier for you to move towards the completion of software testing, instead of hopelessly handling new tickets.
2. Plan work for the long term. Don’t try to get quick wins by any means. It may help in some measure to start creating automated tests faster, but in most cases, it will lead to big problems in the future.
   You should use programs and methodologies based on long term goals. In other words, don’t build the basis of your automated tests with short term goals.
3. Ensure that you have an opportunity to run every created test. Try to improve the test run so that the tests you’ve created would be effective and last not too long.
4. If you don’t understand something, ask a developer. If you want to make a really qualitative test automation system, you need developers, whether they’ll edit the framework, run tests, or build a test environment.
5. Remember that you’ll need to set a test environment during the whole automation process. While working on a project, you’ll definitely face some obstacles. It can be a simple license for necessary tools or network environment editing. Don’t be afraid to be a little intrusive. Since when your project is coming to an end, it will be extremely difficult to get the needed resources and support, etc.

To Sum Up

Following these simple tips, you can easily set a high-quality software test automation process. Hence, you won’t worry excessively about the results of work accomplished. Besides, you will improve the necessary professional skills to help you search for a job in the best quality assurance organization.