AUTOMATION PROCESS/STRATEGY

Automation testing can reduced lots of Manual testing efforts But Automation testing can be beneficial only if it is implemented properly. Yes we need to have our Automation process in place before we start automation for our application.

Every organisation has their own automation testing process where some steps might overlap with each other.

As per my understanding I have designed this Automation Process which we can use in our projects.

DEFINE SCOPE OF AUTOMATION:

Before we start automation it is very important to define the scope of automation. Many times it happen that developer or manager thinks that once automation is done then there will not be any need of manual efforts and so it is very important to have the right expectation. If your process is in place then everyone one will have right expectation form automation.  First and most important thing which we need to make clear is that 100% automation cannot be achieved.

While defining our scope we should have answers for the followings:
What are the feature that are important for the business?
Which test scripts have large amount of data?
Which functionalities are used repeatedly?
How complex test cases are?

AUTOMATON REQ ANALYSIS AND PLANNING:

In this phase we analyse our requirement and decide that what we are going to automate and how we are going to automate? How much time we are going to take? Based on the answers of all these question we create an automation plan and get it approved by the manager.

DEVELOP FRAMEWORK:

If automation framework is not ready then we need to create a framework. For creating a framework we need to consider the following.

Understand the project need and based on that decide if data driven, keyword driven or POM framework will be good for the project?

May be create a POC and get it approved by manager and then start developing the framework.

CREATE AUTOMATION SCRIPT:

Once a framework is in place automation tester can start writing automation script. Following things needs to be taken care while adding any new script:

TEST EXECUTION AND REPORTS CREATION:

In this phase we are actually executing our script, based on that execution Reports are generated. Format of Reports and other feature like weather we need to email the report or save to the directory will happen as decided in Framework POC.

TEST SCRIPT MAINTENANCE:

As our application keeps on updating based on several enhancement s we also need to make sure that our automation code is updated. This is an ongoing exercise where we keeps on updating the code based on the application changes.

 TRAINING:

Training needs to be provided to the team member who are contributing in writing automation script.