Best Practices and Tips to Consider while Creating a Test Automation Strategy

There are several reasons as to why having a Test Automation strategy is beneficial, and by using these best practices and tips in your automated testing strategy, you can ensure that your testing is successful and you can get the maximum return on investment (ROI).

So why is Test Automation so important? This is because not only does Automated testing shorten the development cycles, but also avoids repetitive tasks and improve overall software quality. However, for automated testing to be successful, you first need a Test Automation strategy.

These best practices and tips will help you in setting a strong foundation, thereby improving your software quality.

1. Decide what to Automate: As we all know that automating all tests isn’t entirely possible. Therefore, it is essential to determine which test cases should be automated. Manual Testing works best for tests that are performed a few times. However, tests that are frequently run and need vast amounts of data to perform the same action should be automated.

Creating a successful Test Automation strategy requires rigorous planning and design work. For this reason, you must first start with creating an automation plan. By doing so, you can identify the initial set of tests that should be automated. Define your goal for test automation; it’ll become easier to decide which types of tests to automate. After defining your goal and selecting the types of tests to automate, you should determine what actions your automated tests will perform.

2. Start Testing Early and Often: Test Automation is beneficial when testing is started early and is conducted as often as required. The sooner automation testing begins in the life cycle of the project the better it tests. Also, bugs detected early are cheaper to fix than the ones discovered later in production or deployment.

3. Choose the Right Test Automation Tool: Choosing the right automation testing tool is a crucial part of creating a test automation strategy. It is essential to select the automated testing tool that meets your overall requirements.

The automation testing tool you choose should:
• Provide support for all your platforms.
• Be flexible for testers of all skill levels.
• Be easy-to-use but also feature-rich
• Allow the creation of tests that are reusable, maintainable and resistant to changes in the applications UI.

4. Divide Your Automated Testing Efforts: Creating different tests is based on the skill levels of the QA engineers. Therefore, it is s essential to divide your automated testing efforts by identifying the level of experience and skills for each of your team members.

5. Create Good, Quality Test Data: Data-driven testing requires good test data. For this purpose, you should invest time and effort in creating data that is well structured. Having good test data available is essential because it makes writing automated scripts a lot easier.

If you follow the above-mentioned tips while creating your test automation strategy then not only will you save time but also get faster ROI and reduce time-to-market.