A Guide to Test Automation Types, Tools, and Benefits Short-term success is standard, even if you know how to select the right test automation tools for each part in your organization (as stated by the World Quality Report, only 14-18 percent of associations have even the most elementary test automation tools setup).
It is not that difficult to write a small code to work out a system. The problem comes 6 to 12 months afterward, as soon as a test run takes hours, the test environment and effects get flaky, and the programmers change the anticipated behaviour of the system, transforming the essence of the instrument from test automation to change detection.
Success in automation in testing is much less about getting it right and more about preventing errors that let expensive defects get through--and even small bugs can have large consequences. Bearing that in mind, here are some of the recurring ("mortal") mistakes I've seen over recent years. You know you've made a mistake when you...
That means opening up a browser or mobile simulator and connecting to a back end within the net. But that is slow. Incredibly slow. This strategy works fine for the first weeks when conducting checks only takes five minutes. Over time, however, five minutes turn into one hour or so, then two, then three. Before you know it, testing locks up the tester's computer or test environment all day. So you get started kicking off automatic evaluation runs at 5 am or 5 pm and get the results the following day. That slows to a crawl the feedback loop from development to test, producing wait conditions in the job.
While developers are awaiting comments, they begin another thing, which contributes to multitasking. Eventually, a person re-skins the consumer interface, also, unless there's some sort of business logic layer in the application, all tests will fail and you will be left with no simple way to revise the system. In an effort to get done, groups revert to human exploration, the automation gets much more out of date, and also, eventually, it will be thrown away.
Worst case, your testers spend all day maintaining the automation untrue failures, adjusting the test code to match the current system, and rerunning them. This might have some marginal value, but it is incredibly expensive, and valuable only when the developers are making adjustments that routinely cause real collapse. But that's an issue you need to mend, not cover up using all the BandAid of testing tools.
During my three years in Social text helped maintain an evaluation tooling system through a user interface that was advanced for the time. The team at Social text employs the same framework now, although it now has several tests running at one time on Amazon's Electric Compute Cloud. Although we had a fantastic deal of GUI-driving tests, we had developer-facing (unit) and web services (integration) tests, a visual slideshow that testers could watch for every single browser, and a strategy to explore by hand for every single release. This combination of approaches to decrease risk meant we discovered problems early.