How to Implement Enterprise Test Automation in the Real World

The digitalization of economies is causing a churn as enterprises embrace new technologies and paradigms to bring about market differentiation for the end customers. The need for quality assurance for every component of the digital ecosystem has become important, with customer experience becoming the ultimate milestone to be achieved. This brings into the equation enterprise test automation services to implement test automation and validate the quality of applications under testing. However, in doing so, enterprises ought to select the right automation framework and automate the right processes. Read further to know what should be automated, how to automate, and the challenges testers are likely to face in their pursuit.

What should enterprises automate for testing?

Any enterprise process automation process covers the following aspects:

l Features, components, or modules of applications or websites that are critical for business and need continuous monitoring.

l Features, components, or modules that are too complex for manual testing.

l Features that need to undergo repeated testing to deliver high levels of performance.

l Integration tests to validate the working of various components with interfaces to each other.

l Unit tests to validate the working of functions or classes in isolation.

l Validate user journeys through end-to-end testing across platforms, devices, browsers, and networks.

l Conduct performance testing to evaluate the reliability, stability, and scalability of the application.

Challenges to implementing enterprise intelligent automation

Although test automation is the need of the hour for enterprises to remain competitive, it entails a few challenges that test automation services need to grapple with.

Planning: It is always a challenge to correctly estimate the time and resources needed for implementing enterprise test automation. Besides, the planning process may include activities such as finalizing a test automation framework and keeping it updated, facing situations of test failures comprising false positives, finding the causes of test failures (due to test script, test data, or test environment, etc.), and creating test cases for advanced scenarios, among others.

Test complexity: Not all automated tests are equal. For instance, the resources, time, and effort needed to automate tests for basic actions (creating, logging, and authenticating an account) will be different from those needed to automate business-critical processes. This is due to the fact that business-critical processes entail third-party databases, integrated components, and/or multiple layers, among others.

False positives: Any automated testing suite built by QA automation services can generate false positives. This goes on to increase in number and frequency when tests are expanded to cover more areas of the application. The test suites should be modified to address such false positives as they may lull developers into believing that everything is fine with the software and that every outlier is a false positive, thereby missing the real one.

Scalability: When it comes to building automated test suites quickly, it is better to employ high-performing teams. These teams will have the skills to adopt new methodologies and deliver quality software within short turnarounds. They are expected to perform software QA automation by maintaining speed, efficiency, and precision, and the organization has to provide them with the right tools and training.

How to implement enterprise test automation in the digital world

The steps software test automation services should take to automate tests in the real-world include:

Choose the test cases to automate: It does not make sense to automate all processes, for there will be candidates for manual testing as well. Tests that are repetitive in nature, need to run frequently, and require a large quantity of data should be automated. Further, tests with multiple builds and data sets are prone to causing errors, possessing high-risk conditions, and needing to run on various hardware and software platforms are the ones to be automated. So, begin by identifying the initial tests and the type of tests to automate and defining the testing goal. Thereafter, decide the actions the automated tests will take. Divide large and complex automated tests into smaller, logical tests.

Choose the right testing tool: The right automated testing tool should be compatible with your platform and technology -.Net, WPF, C#, and others. Besides, check whether testers can pull off the tests with the skills they possess and/or if the tool supports a record-and-playback function. The tool should be able to create tests that are maintainable, reusable, and flexible. For instance, will the automated tests break if the UI changes?

Create quality test data: For any data-driven testing, the need to have quality and structured data is critical. Here, the data might be provided from a database or data source such as XML files, database tables, or excel sheets. Furthermore, the data files should be extensible, allowing the easy addition of new data. The quicker good quality test data is created, the easier it will be to extend the automated tests to cover more areas of the application.

Conclusion

The above-mentioned practices can be a surefire way to achieve successful test automation. It is better for enterprises to hire an experienced automation testing company to implement the critical and complex task of test automation and achieve their business objectives.

Stark is a software Tech enthusiastic & works at Cigniti Technologies. I'm having a great understanding of today's software testing quality that yields strong results