Best Practices of Test Automation

To get maximum ROI out of automation, here are some best practices to be followed:

1. Scope of Automation needs to be determined in detail before the start of the project. This helps in having a predictable and well defined automation plan which can be executed in order to achieve automation goals.

2. Selecting the right automation tool: The right automation tool is the one which is most effective in helping you achieve all your automation goals with minimal efforts and easy to maintain. Test Tool selection largely depends on the technology the Application Under Test (AUT) is built on. For instance QTP does not support Informatica. So QTP cannot be used for testing Informatica applications. It’s a good idea to conduct Proof of Concept of Tool on AUT.

3. Scripting Standards: Coding Guidelines should be followed while writing the automation scripts, like:

  • Create uniform scripts, comments and indentation of the code
  • Adequate Exception handling: System failure or unexpected behavior of the application should be handled gracefully (without crashing).
  • User defined messages should be coded or standardized for Error Logging.

4. Measurement metrics: Success of automation cannot be determined by only comparing the manual v/s automation effort, but also by capturing the following metrics:

  • Time required for executing automation testing for each and every release cycle
  • Reduction in Time taken for release Productivity improvement
  • Customer satisfaction Index & %age of defects found

The above guidelines if observed can greatly help in making your automation successful.

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