If you work as a QA engineer for any of the web development companies, you know well that the adoption of innovative test automation processes is imperative for a web development project’s success. Robust test automation techniques help to build efficient, high-quality products with happy customers as the end result.
This article discusses the ten strategies that web development QA teams can rely on while building their automation testing frameworks. You’ll also find tried and tested tips and techniques regarding efficient planning, executing, reporting, and more!
10 Strategies for Web Test Automation Success
1. Identify the goal – What is the test automation project aiming to achieve?
Automation test strategies are built around what the business requirements are – as per the specific project goal. When the QA test team starts automating the manual test cases, they should first define the project goal. The purpose should be identified and communicated to all the team members.
2. Identify the current scenario of the project.
The team needs to analyze the project’s present situation based on:
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- What is the available financial budget?
- Does the team have employees with the required skill set regarding programming language knowledge, test automation tool knowledge, etc?
- What test automation tools’ licenses do they already have? If none, do they plan to purchase the license, or do they plan to rely on a free test automation tool?
- What test environment is available? Do they plan to rely upon on-premises machines or cloud-deployed tests?
3. Plan well – planning is key!
While choosing which manual test cases to be automated, QA teams need to check the feasibility aspects, prioritize, and group test scripts accordingly. Test data will be at the base of all the test automation scripts. Ideally, test data management should be planned in detail and applied across the test scripts.
As per the project’s current scenario, hiring, budgeting, and scheduling need to be performed. Also, the test automation tool needs to be chosen as per the budget and goals in mind. Skilled QA engineers need to be hired, or the existing workforce needs to be trained to learn the test automation tool that the project aims to use. Apart from this, test data planning and test environment setup planning need to be performed.
4. Choose the ideal web test automation tool as per the test automation goal.
The QA project needs to find a test automation tool as per primary factors such as:
- the intent of the project as per the business need of the customer.
- the type of tests – Is it web API test automation, web GUI test automation, etc.?
- the team members’ programming skills.
- the integration capabilities with 3rd party tools.
The team can choose among end-to-end automation platforms that offer multiple types of test offerings in a single tool or rely on specialized devices. As per the team members’ programming skills, coded or non-coded platforms can be chosen for test automation development.
Also, several tools are powered by AI and ML, which makes a QA engineer’s job easier. Teams can rely on such tools to get smarter in test automation.
5. Decide the “way of working” among team members.
As the test automation project kicks off, the team will need to decide on the following points and check if the associated tools integrate with the test automation platform. Some questions teams can ask themselves are:
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- How are the team members going to collaborate? If they plan to use popular collaboration tools, check if they integrate with the test automation platform.
- Is the team going to follow the Agile principles as they work? If yes, then check if the automation platform integrates with tools that enable this way of working.
- As the team develops the framework, they will share code for reviews, reuse code blocks, etc. How will this be done? A good idea would be to check if the tool allows sharing capabilities.
6. Decide how the automation test design and execution are going to be performed.
Being organized will help QA teams in the long run. Keeping reusability in mind, team members can identify, build, and manage reusable code blocks in internal libraries. Also, they can rely on external libraries as well. Eventually, the project saves time by avoiding re-inventing the wheel on standard features.
For example, you could place the login page-related code in the standard library. You may be aware that many test cases would repeatedly use this piece of code as the entry point. Accordingly, the test scripts can make calls to these reusable functions instead of re-designing and re-scripting them.
7. Decide how the automation test maintenance and reporting are going to be performed.
Also, check if the test automation tool itself enables optimum test coverage. This may be determined by several factors such as cross-platform support, cross-browser testing, and more. Test automation tools with AI and ML features can ease the project’s maintenance phase using features such as NLP, self-healing capabilities, and more.
Visual test reports are trending in many of the test automation tools. Team members need to start exploring the tool’s features to record and build test reports efficiently. Consequently, anyone from the organization can understand the quality of the product being tested – be it the team members, the business analysts, or the project managers.
8. Keep Improving
Ideally, the test automation suite should keep evolving. Team members should discuss, document lessons learned, and work on any improvements as required. Retrospective meetings should discuss these aspects regularly. Continuous improvement will drive the project to higher levels of success.
9. Keep Learning
To keep up with the fast-advancing technologies, QA engineers should keep tabs on the latest web test automation tools coming on the market. Many of the tools are now adding additional features to their existing skillset to catch up with ever-updating business needs. Accordingly, QA team members should stay current on the tool’s new features so as not to miss out on any new useful aspects.
10. Share the QA manual and automation test activities across all levels of the organization.
Apart from the QA engineers, it would be great if the web development team, the business analyst team, etc., could get involved in the QA activities. It will help to share the Quality Assurance mindset throughout the organization at all levels. Some ways that the business analysts can get involved is by making use of zero-coded platforms and behavior-driven development (BDD) platforms that BAs can easily understand.
Easy-to-comprehend test reports are quickly needed to analyze the product quality and provide feedback accordingly. Thus, the whole organization can work together on imbibing the quality practices in all parts of the software development life cycle.
Conclusion
The strategies mentioned in this article are the basic fundamental building blocks to a successful web test automation project. Thankfully, web test automation is much easier now, with many AI-smart and efficient test automation tools available on the market.
In the meantime, while building robust test automation frameworks, the teams should keep improving their strategies. An optimized, the automated test suite will help benefit the QA project and, in the long run, the web development company. The result: delivery of a high-quality product to the customer.
