Most companies are affected by some problem or the other in new test automation services projects. Keep such windfalls in mind and build stable automation frameworks and ensure a collaborative team effort and own your automation. For automation to be successful, companies should approach it with realistic goals, the right attitude, and a willingness to make it work. Here are eight reasons your automation project can fail:
Unable to describe individual business goals that need to be solved:Return On Investment (ROI) should be understood if you are running automation tied to a business goal, then business leaders will stay invested. Use an open-source tool and hook it into your build server and spend time making your project feature-rich by writing test cases that are aligned to the same business goal.
Automation should be treated as a timed activity and not a process:Make sure developers who build the automation framework hand it over to a competent technical QA team to carry forward. Automation is a software project and should be flexible and easy to maintain. Continuous work needs to be done to update the framework, like new updates, features, and requirements. Most frameworks are tied into other systems like build, metrics, and cloud services, so keep it synced as it evolves.
A team creates it without sole responsibility for standards:Slower test case development by a smaller team that builds in redundancy and regularly reviews and gives feedback to produce quicker value to the project. This team checks requirements, understand business goals, and builds infrastructure to drive the project forward. With strong leadership, an approved roadmap, and strict quality controls, the team should be confident in their tests and its ability to produce reliable results. Each test should be reviewed to ensure it fits, and the team’s QA engineers should be autonomous.
Understand what to and what not to automate:It is imperative to understand that it is good to automate certain functionalities of a webpage and that some scenarios are better tested manually. Only automate stable aspects of your app or web product that is not prone to change but needs to be continuously retested. Save valuable testing effort by automating such repetitive tasks and ensure testers spend time performing exploratory testing.
The team isn’t technically skilled enough to handle the project:Testers should have a certain level of technical expertise to do automation the right way. Such QA team members can be expensive, and not all companies can afford to hire such automation engineers. So hire a few technical experts, but if it isn’t an option, invest in a tool that can help you automate the processes.
Lack of visibility around automation techniques:To be more visible, create an automation document listing all features automated, modules covered, and framework set up. Your method of automation should be clearly defined for the entire Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC). Automation tasks need to be treated separately to make them easier to manage. Make the results visible to the whole team via dashboards and discuss daily progress in team huddles. Conduct sessions that cover different trends, ethical practices, and tools. Make your automation a collaborative effort by involving the complete team in planning and writing it.
Check the testability of the application:Build an application that is easily testable from all (unit, system, integration, and acceptance) levels. Don’t build complex applications that cannot be tested and ensure the testability of a story, feature, or requirement during backlog sprucing, and sprint planning meetings before the development begins. It will alleviate problems later in the SDLC.
Vague automation goals:A robust automation framework seamlessly integrates with Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipeline, is easily maintainable because it gives quick feedback and runs consistently. Identify two or three high-level functionalities and collect input from automating and stabilizing them first. Separate your automation suites for smoke tests (run after every code check-in) and regression tests (run daily and covers different functionalities).
In summary, these common reasons that cause automation to fail need to be avoided for a successful automation implementation. Keep your projects focused on increasing ROI and business value and hire a highly skilled team or test automation company to ensure a smooth transition. Automation testing companies, like Codoid, can help you in this respect.
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