Test automation best practices

Test automation is a must in today’s world, as there’s no other way to deliver at the pace users demand without compromising quality. You must do test automation right; otherwise, you won’t reap the promised returns. Below, learn about test automation best practices that will help you make your testing strategy as efficient as it can be.

Introduction to test automation

What is test automation?

Test automation, as the name implies, is the practice of carrying out software testing in an automated way with the help of specialized tools. Test automation isn’t just about writing automated tests, though. It encompasses an entire strategy you must define and put in place that deals with many aspects, such as test data management, test coverage, integration with your existing ecosystem of tools, gathering of metrics and analytics, and much more.

It’s important to understand that when it comes to test automation, the part that is automated is the execution of the tests. The initial creation of the tests is something that relies on the creativity and ingenuity of human professionals, and that’s where most of your investment lies.

With test automation, you can guarantee that tests are executed in the same way, 100% of the time.

Benefits of test automation

When it comes to the benefits of test automation, the first word that often comes to mind is “time.” That makes perfect sense as automated tests can be executed at a tiny fraction of the time it would take manual testers to do the same.

But there are more benefits than just saving time:

• Reproducibility: With test automation, you can guarantee that tests are executed in the same way, 100% of the time.
• Correctness: As long as your test script is correct, you can rest assured it’s going to run correctly every time.
• Defects caught earlier: With test automation, teams can run tests more often, which causes them to find and fix more defects earlier.
• Lower cost: After you pay the initial price of creating your test scripts, you get all the subsequent executions for “free.”
• Avoids regressions: A comprehensive automated test suite can double as a regression test suite, enabling teams to ensure they haven’t broken the application after a change.
• Documentation: Even though this isn’t the major goal of test automation, it’s a nice add-on: Your test suite can double as a form of executable documentation, demonstrating how the application is supposed to work.

Avoiding product or quality regressions is the major benefit

Of the benefits listed, avoiding regressions is the most important one. The problem is that software applications tend to be prone to regressions. You fix one thing and break another, seemingly unrelated one. You add a new feature, and an old one stops working.

To be sure nothing is broken, any application but the most trivial ones would have to be comprehensively tested, even after the tiniest of changes. Done manually, this would skyrocket the cost of development, besides slowing down the delivery of new features.

Done automatically, the execution of your regression suite is something that takes probably minutes.

Common challenges in test automation

A big challenge right from the start is deciding exactly which types of test automation you’re going to use. The options for types of automated of testing are endless.

Another significant challenge is ensuring you have qualified professionals for this task. Under the test automation umbrella there are many forms of automated testing, some performed by developers, others by QA professionals, and some cutting-edge approaches have even the clients and users perform testing. Understanding to whom to assign testing tasks and ensuring those people have the necessary skills is a heavy lift.

Programmers write unit tests so that their confidence in the operation of the program can become part of the program itself. Customers write functional tests so that their confidence in the operation of the program can become part of the program too.

—Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained

Implementing your test automation strategy is also a big challenge that involves selecting tools, acquiring licenses, and possibly provisioning infrastructure, all of which include securing the necessary budget. Then, you must put all of that into place, ensure it works, train the team members in charge, document your approaches, and then maintain the process.

Designing/writing your tests efficiently can also be challenging. For instance, when it comes to unit testing:

• What’s your mocking strategy?
• How do you avoid the trap of overspecification that makes tests hard to maintain?
• When it comes to UI testing, how do you find stable locators for the elements, so your tests don’t become fragile and break after every change?

You also have the challenge of maintaining your ever-growing suite of tests. Sometimes you need to delete old tests that no longer make sense, fix brittle failing tests that broke due to changes in the code, or refactor testing classes to avoid duplication or other issues.

When it comes to creating your test cases, the first best practice is to have a clear test automation strategy.

Best practices for test automation

Let’s now cover some of the main best practices for test automation, from the design, execution, and maintainability points of view.

When it comes to creating your test cases, the first best practice is to have a clear test automation strategy. This includes, for instance, knowing about the different types of automated testing, deciding which ones you’ll leverage, and how to implement each one of them. A great concept that can guide you here is the test pyramid.

Also, when creating tests cases, you want to reduce the maintainability burden of your tests. So, when writing Selenium test cases, you might want to leverage the Page Object Model pattern, in order toto keep your tests structured and avoid code duplication. For unit testing, you’ll want to avoid too much reliance on mocking and interaction-based testing, which will cause your tests to break encapsulation, and depend on internal implementation details of the code under test.

Prioritize your efforts

It’s also crucial that you prioritize wisely when starting your test automation strategy. If you have zero test automation right now, you won’t get to a high level of coverage in a short amount of time. The initial effort of creating your first automated tests will be huge, and you most likely don’t have as many resources as you wish.

So prioritize by choosing to automate:

• Areas that are critical business flows inside the application
• Parts of the codebase that are highly complex and are frequently changed
• Areas of the application that are known to have originated many bugs in the past
• Areas of the application that are hard or error-prone to test manually

Continuous testing and shift left

Another crucial practice in test automation is making sure your tests run automatically. In practice, that means making your CI/CD pipeline run your tests, commit lands on your main branch—or when you open a pull request, if you follow a PR-based workflow. If you use automatic deploys, they should not happen when the test suite fails.

A final and somewhat new best practice would be to integrate AI and machine learning into your test automation approach. Testing tools such as Tricentis Tosca integrate AI capabilities that result in self-healing tests that make your test suite more robust, reducing the burden of test maintainability.

Another important concept you’ll hear enough is “shift-left testing.” Shifting left simply means starting something as early as possible in your software development life cycle. Shift-left testing, then, is basically starting your testing activities as early as possible, and continually testing at all stages of your development pipeline.

Tosca can also help you in this regard. With its Vision AI capabilities, it can help you create test cases from mockups of pages that don’t even exist yet, driving the development of such functionalities and enabling testing as early as possible.

Conclusion

Test automation can bring you great rewards. But it also brings big challenges, so you must be aware of best practices to beat those challenges and implement an efficient test automation strategy that allows the rapid delivery of high-quality features. There are plenty of industry best practices, but the main focuses should be understanding the ecosystem of test automation, creating a clear strategy, and investing in tools and approaches that are maintainable in the long term.

This post was written by Carlos Schults. Carlos is a skilled software engineer and an accomplished technical writer for various clients. His passion is to get to the bottom (the original source) of things and captivate readers with approachable and informative technical content.