Many product companies consider software quality to be the most important priority.

If you join a team where automation testing has not been established yet, you may become a pioneer who will deploy it.

Such rules of the game not only give us the possibility to develop more qualitative software but also spend little time and money on its development.

[highlight dark=”no”]An automation testing deployment can be reduced to 7 steps[/highlight], which will prevent us from making mistakes.

Convince the management

You won’t manage to deploy load testing, regardless of how much you or any project team members wish to do this if your management doesn’t think that it’s profitable.

It’s a well-known fact that qualitative test automation is not cheap.

Testing tools are expensive and also, don’t forget about salaries for software developers and support teams.

Approximately 2-3 months are needed to develop an initial base of automated tests.

And so you need to prove to management that such expenses are necessary and they need to wait until automation will show any results.

But if managers don’t agree with you, you are almost helpless. They will see their mistake only in some time when numerous customers will complain about a low-quality software since quality is the most important thing.

Quality definitely affects the level of sales, the popularity of your company’s services, long-term cooperation with clients, the way potential users and investors perceive your company.

Employing software testing experts

There are 2 types of test automation experts: architects and automation engineers.

An automation architect is quite a closed job that has not so many specialists and their work costs a lot of money.

But you can’t deploy good automation without them.

Such specialists are usually responsible for the development of automation systems, understand what tools and for what should be used, can build a proper framework, and finally, tell what test cases should be primarily automated.

If you manage to find an architect, then 50% of test automation implementation will be achieved.

You can also ask automation engineers, whose task is to transform manual tests into automated ones, for help.

They can be led by an architect and be responsible for the development and run of test scripts.

Using a proper automation tool

The implementation of this step is quite complex since today’s IT market offers various tools of all kinds, and you need to select the best fit for your products.

You should use these tips while selecting proper software:

• Software should comply with the budget. Automation tools are expensive, therefore, you need to budget for the costs for this task;
• Software should support technologies that you use while developing a product. For example, if you work with Flash/Silverlight, an automation tool should also support them;
• There should be sufficient qualified specialists, that can manage automation tools;
• Selected software should have the function of generating reports and logs so that you will be able to show the results to managers or a client anytime.

Educating employees

If you have managed to find proper employees and selected proper tools, then it’s time to educate employees on working with it.

If manual QA engineers become automated specialists, they should be familiar with the terms and peculiarities of automation.

If you have hired a remote automated tester, he/she should be given all data on software that is being tested, the peculiarities of previous manual testing, and the targets that should be met, according to the management.

Good communication between manual testers, automated specialists, and a development department is required for building long-term and reliable work relations.

Preparing and implementing an automation framework

The most important task for any automated tester is creating an automation framework, that can support your automated tests during a long period of time.

To understand completely the importance of developing a separate automation framework, you can read the following article.

Developing a deployment plan and developing the scripts

Writing an implementation plan entails selecting the environment where scripts will be executed.

Such an environment contains OS, web browsers, and additional configurations.

An automation team usually executes scripts after each build but everything depends on the rules that have been established in a company.

There are project managers that execute scripts after each build before releases and there are companies that have the entire department that works on this.

When a framework is developed, it’s time to start developing the scripts.

All test scripts should be written only using naming conventions.

Source software code should be inside version control systems to not be lost.

You should have version control and change history available at hand.

System maintenance of scripts

If your team monitors the most popular development practices and uses a qualitative framework, then you won’t have problems with technical maintenance.

Such maintenance is needed only if software should be constantly changed.

Test scripts should be updated, to record all changes in code and provide completely efficient execution.

But if a framework is not very practical and you are not interested in development, then technical maintenance will be really awful.

Numerous automation projects fail due to the reason that a selected set of scripts is of a low quality.