QA services and testing are as old as the computer itself. With the focus on automating wherever possible, automated testing might seem like a no brainer. However, many factors must be considered before implementing automated testing. Organizations must ensure that projects are appropriate for automated testing and business requirements are clear.
Is Your Organization Ready?
While the basics might seem obvious, they are easy to miss in the rush to automate “because everyone else is doing it.” A certain level of maturity is required. It’s impractical to look to automation if your development and testing processes are misaligned. Projects must have a high level of organization, along with quality and consistent development, from the start. An understanding of QA services in project development phase is critical. Projects developed without QA considerations are playing catch up from the start. In addition, an enhanced skillset is required for automated testing.
Have You Determined Your Business Requirements?
It is essential that the decision to automate testing should be made with support from development. Business requirements must be considered just like any other initiative. Considerations include:
- Has your organization defined the scope of the project?
- Are you familiar with the different automated testing frameworks?
- Have you determined your metrics for testing?
- Have you researched whether you want to build or buy the tools needed?
- What is the schedule for the implementation? Is this realistic?
- Do you know the amount of data that needs to be validated?
- Have you determined maintenance needs and future version considerations?
- Have you considered the end-user experience?
Is Your Current Testing State Primed for Automated Testing?
If your current testing state is poorly structured, with haphazard manual scripts and test cases, automated testing will only compound the problem. An organization must be open as well as ready to change to automate testing. In addition to gaining support from development, take a critical look at the quality of the development work and documentation repository.
If development and QA services have collaborated successfully for manual testing, then it’s time to review the manual test scripts developed to evaluate what can be automated.
Should Testing Be Automated for This Project?
Not every test case should be automated. According to Oracle, “every company doing automated testing still does some amount of manual testing.”
Organizations need to consider the project and test cases before deciding to use automated testing. A major strategic project may benefit from a more hands-on testing approach – also functions with high complexity. In addition, subjective validation, such as UX or ensuring that the appropriate image is used, requires manual testing. And it wouldn’t make sense to use automated testing for a new project or one that has frequent changes.
Automated testing is best for functions that are repetitive and consistent across test cycles. It makes a huge impact on time and costs when applied to functions that need to be validated through many different inputs (i.e., logins, transactions, forms). Regression and load testing can also be candidates for automated testing.
Automated testing can have a huge impact on your organization. Time and costs associated with highly repetitive tasks can be greatly reduced, reporting can be simplified and improved, and key talent can be freed up to focus on your organization’s value-adding, high priority projects.
