In this era witnessing fast-growing software development, automation testing is the major approach to ensure the software application is high quality, functions properly, and is delivered on time. It helps detect bugs and errors early in the development process, allowing the team to fix the issue at the earliest before it turns out to be complex and difficult to fix. This can be achieved by implementing an effective automated testing strategy that ensures each critical aspect of software applications is tested.
You can understand automated testing strategy is a detailed plan that defines the testing process of software applications using tools and frameworks. Automation testing strategy is a crucial part of the software development life cycle as it helps ensure the high functionality of software applications, lowers the time and cost of software development, and improves its overall efficiency.
To implement a successful automated testing strategy, some key steps you should follow include having a clear testing objective, selecting the right automation tools and technologies, and developing a robust test plan. This requires careful test planning and execution. However, these could be difficult tasks, especially when the team lacks the required skill and expertise.
This article will discuss different ways to implement an automation testing strategy successfully. This will guide you to get started with automation testing to ensure the quality of the software applications.
Let us get started.
What is an Automated Testing Strategy?
The automated testing strategy is a detailed plan with defined objectives, goals, and scope of testing outlining software testing methodologies, tools, and techniques used to test software applications. Its key purpose is to ensure software applications are tested efficiently and reliably, lowering the testing time and cost. You can find and audit the risks and defects and communicate the functionality of the software application being tested.
Why need an Automated Testing Strategy?
An effective test automation strategy is the key to the success of test automation of software applications. It allows the team to find defects early in the development cycle, reducing the risk of production failures and improvising software application quality. It helps organizations remain competitive in the software industry and eliminate any technological failures.
However, if you don’t have a good and effective automation strategy, automation testing may be impacted, leading to a poor-functioning software application. Here, now we will discuss different ways by which you can implement a successful test automation strategy.
Way to Implement an Automated Testing Strategy
To implement a successful automated testing strategy, careful planning and execution of the test are significant. In this process, you are required to incorporate various strategies and look out to optimize automation testing. The following are some of the key steps that software development teams can take to implement a successful automated testing strategy:
Define the Goal and Scope of the Test Automation Strategy
Setting up goals is paramount to starting an automation testing strategy as it directs the development team to strategize the test to achieve it. Building a testing strategy will not lead to the desired endpoint without a clear goal and objective for testing software applications. For example, you must identify the key features and functionalities of the software application that require testing, as well as the expected outcomes and acceptance criteria. Based on this, you can easily define your test automation strategy.
The best approach to define the goal of the test strategy is to perform Automation Feasibility Analysis that determines which tasks to be automated. As it is impossible to automate each test, it is always suggested to narrow the test to certain aspects that can be automated. Such aspects include testing across multiple interfaces and devices, repetitive test cases like login, and time-consuming tasks.
Planning the Test Approach
When you know what to automate, it's important to plan your test approach that decides on proceeding with various testing types. This can be successfully done by creating test pyramids. It will help to decide the different testing type execution orders that define best to test your software application. Therefore, this must be included in the automation testing strategy for successful implementation.
Test pyramids help strategize different tests, their role, frequency, and time, which gives better and more accurate test outcomes. Some common tests that should be focused on include Unit testing, Integration testing, UI testing, end-to-end testing, cross-browser testing, and cross-platform testing. Hence, knowing what and how to test with the respective test plan helps to implement an automation testing strategy that includes all test case design elements of software applications.
Choose an Automation Testing Framework
In implementing an automation testing strategy, having a robust and correct testing framework helps to direct the automation testing towards quality development of software development. Many automation frameworks are available for you to decide the best one that fits your software development projects.
Some of those frameworks include linear automation framework, data driver test framework, keyword driven framework, Page Object Model, Modular driven framework, behavior-driven, and hybrid framework. The selection of an appropriate testing framework should be based on factors such as the technology stack, application architecture, and test scenarios.
Choose the Right Automation Tools
There are many automation testing tools; choosing the right one for a test automation strategy is key to its successful implementation. It is always preferred to choose your automation testing tools based on the requirements of software applications, supported browsers/platform and programming language, budget, and type of application to be tested (web app or mobile app).
For example, Selenium is the preferred testing framework for web automation, while Appium leads the competition for mobile app testing. However, software applications' functions on various platforms define their quality; choosing automation tools that support most environments and platforms is always suggested.
Leveraging automation testing by opting for a cloud-based digital experience testing platform like LambdaTest to test your software application is one of the best ways to implement an automation testing strategy. It allows real-time and automation testing across 3000+ environments and on a real device cloud. LambdaTest allows you to perform automation testing using frameworks and tools like Selenium, Playwright, Cypress, and others.
With its unified digital experience testing cloud, you can quicken the test execution and ensure the quality release of the software application. Thus, such features make it the top choice among other cloud-based testing platforms.
Write Test Scripts and Execute Test Cases.
When you have decided on the framework and tools to be used for automation testing, the next approach for implementing the automation testing strategy includes writing test scripts and executing test cases. Test scripts are stepwise instructions written in specific programming languages on how to execute test cases. While test cases are detailed steps, data, and prerequisites to execute the test for every specific software application feature.
Automation testing depends on high-quality test cases that signify the intended functionality of software application that covers all possible use cases and inputs. Including high-quality test cases and test scripts as part of the automation testing strategy can identify defects and issues in the software application before it is deployed to production. You can efficiently automate the test as they provide clear instructions and expected test outcomes, reducing the risk of errors in the testing process, thereby leading to the effective implementation of automation testing strategy.
Test Execution and DevOps Integration
Implementing an automation testing strategy requires a test execution plan based on the test scripts and test cases. In test execution planning, the major challenge faced is identifying and prioritizing test cases to execute. As many software application functionalities require testing, executing the critical functionality is always suggested considering limited resources and time.
You can plan your test based on risk-based testing, where test cases deemed to have a higher risk of causing issues or impacting the business are prioritized for execution. Apart from this, you can consider creating test suites like smoke, regression, and sanity with defining execution strategy like smoke testing needs to be done once per day, and regression test is done twice a week.
Further, integrating automation testing with a DevOps approach is evolving to be important for software development teams. Integrating automation testing with a DevOps approach can be performed more efficiently and effectively, resulting in faster and more reliable software releases.
Conclusion
Implementing an automation testing strategy may be challenging for some, particularly those with less expertise and skills. Some common challenges you might experience include selecting the appropriate testing tools and frameworks, identifying the right test cases to automate, and integrating automation testing with the overall software development process. However, the correct strategic approach, as explained in this article, can help in its successful implementation.
The approaches like defining the scope and goal of the test, representing correct automation testing tools and framework, risk-based testing, execution of test case, and DevOps integration allow success in their automation testing strategy. On the whole, you must have a combination of technical expertise, effective communication and collaboration, and a commitment to continuous improvement.
