A Practical Guide to Test Automation Strategy

Is your software testing feeling chaotic? A solid test automation strategy can change that. It's the key to preventing bugs before they become a headache, saving you time, money, and stress. Whether you're new to automation or want to refine your current approach, this guide provides practical steps to build a winning automation test strategy that protects your product and delights your customers. We'll cover everything from planning and implementation to identifying and mitigating automation risks, so you can achieve true testing mastery.

We’ll show you a rough guide on how to develop this strategy and talk about how these things help you mitigate risk in the development process as a whole. First, here’s how a robust software test automation strategy might help you.

The Role and Benefits of a Software Automation Test Strategy

Test automation generally refers to running repetitive tests with minimal manual intervention. Automated tests can be written and executed using automation tools designed to replicate real-life human interactions with the software to ensure the software behaves as you want it to. 

There are three major areas in which a good test automation strategy can benefit software development. These are cost, quality, and time to market. Automation has been used in one form or another to achieve these benefits for decades, and it’s only getting better. Let’s isolate these three major perks and explain how they’re affected by automated testing:

Key Takeaways

• Effective test automation hinges on a well-defined strategy: This reduces costs, elevates software quality, and accelerates time to market by optimizing testing and minimizing manual work.
• Building a winning strategy requires planning and adaptability: Pinpoint your automation goals, choose the right tools and frameworks, establish clear metrics, and prioritize tests based on risk. Refine your approach through trial and error as needed.
• Proactive planning helps sidestep common automation pitfalls: Address budget limitations head-on, ensure your team has sufficient training and resources, and select tools that fit your project. Create reusable test scripts to boost efficiency and avoid unnecessary repetition.

Types of Automated Tests and Testing Levels

Functional vs. Non-functional Testing

Automated testing breaks down into two core types: functional and non-functional. Functional testing verifies that your software behaves as expected—clicking a button leads to the correct next step, for example. Non-functional testing assesses qualities like performance, security, and usability. Think load times, resistance to hacking attempts, and how intuitive the software is for users.

Test Object (Performance, Security, Accessibility, UI, API, etc.)

Different tests target various aspects of your software. Performance testing evaluates speed and responsiveness. Security testing probes for vulnerabilities. Accessibility testing ensures usability for all users, including those with disabilities. UI testing checks for user interface consistency, and API testing verifies the functionality of application programming interfaces, which allow different software systems to communicate.

Testing Levels and the Test Pyramid (Unit, Integration, System, Acceptance)

The test pyramid provides a balanced testing approach across different levels. At the base are unit tests, which examine individual components. Integration tests, in the middle, check how these components interact. At the top, system or acceptance tests evaluate the entire system as a whole. This structured approach ensures comprehensive coverage and efficient use of resources.

Smoke Tests

Smoke tests are a quick check of essential functionalities. They confirm that the most critical features are working correctly before more in-depth testing begins, saving time and effort by catching major issues early.

Regression Tests

Regression tests are your safety net. They ensure that recent code changes haven’t negatively impacted existing features. These tests are crucial for maintaining stability as your software evolves and undergoes frequent updates.

API Tests

API tests focus on the backend services that power your application. They confirm that these services function correctly and handle requests as expected, ensuring smooth data flow and communication between different parts of your system, regardless of the user interface.

Test Automation Frameworks

Linear Framework

The linear framework is the simplest approach. Test cases are executed sequentially, one after another. This is a good starting point for small projects with limited complexity, or for teams new to automation.

Data-Driven Framework

A data-driven framework runs the same scripts with different data sets. This allows for broad testing with minimal code changes, making it efficient for scenarios with varying inputs, like testing different user profiles or form submissions.

Keyword-Driven Framework

The keyword-driven framework uses keywords to represent actions. This makes it easier for non-technical team members to create and understand test cases, fostering collaboration and expanding the pool of people who can contribute to testing efforts.

Page Object Model (POM) Framework

POM enhances test maintenance and reduces code duplication. It creates an object repository for web UI elements, making tests more resilient to UI changes, which is especially valuable in agile development environments.

Modular Framework

The modular framework divides your application into smaller, testable modules. This simplifies test creation and maintenance, especially for large and complex applications, by allowing teams to focus on specific areas of functionality.

Library Architecture Framework

This framework organizes test scripts into reusable libraries. This promotes code reuse and reduces redundancy, making your test suite more efficient and easier to manage over time.

Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) Framework

BDD frameworks emphasize collaboration between developers, QA, and non-technical stakeholders. They use natural language to define test cases, improving communication and shared understanding of desired software behavior.

Hybrid Framework

A hybrid framework combines elements of multiple frameworks. This offers flexibility and allows you to tailor your approach to the specific needs of your project, leveraging the strengths of different frameworks to create a customized solution.

Risk Assessment and Prioritization

Identifying Potential Risks

Risk analysis is crucial. It helps you pinpoint potential problems early in development, allowing for proactive mitigation and preventing small issues from escalating into major problems.

Prioritizing Tests Based on Risk

Prioritize tests based on the likelihood and impact of potential failures. Focus your efforts on areas with the highest risk to maximize the effectiveness of your testing and ensure that critical functionalities are thoroughly validated. This risk-based approach helps optimize resource allocation and ensures that the most important areas receive adequate attention.

Test Data Management and Environment Setup

Cost – The high rate of testing available when using automation means it’s possible to run numerous tests in quick succession, sometimes even in parallel, dramatically reducing testing time without compromising on quality. This leads to much lower human resource costs for the entire testing process.

Quality – A good test automation strategy focuses on the testing that lends itself to automation, again, without reducing quality. In fact, automated testing can improve software quality by being rapidly repeatable without the potential for human error and allows for more testing to occur in the same amount of time. 

Time to market – As we mentioned, effective automated testing speeds up the process as a whole, reducing release times without having to cut corners on either the quality or volume of testing. 

In order to benefit from all of these advantages, automated testing needs to be implemented in the right way and at the right time. This is where a test automation strategy comes into play. A strategy gives your teams an idea of where to begin, how to implement an agile (or otherwise appropriate) process to your testing, and which metrics you’ll need to identify whether it’s been successful and what your ROI for the testing was.

How to Develop a Test Automation Strategy for Your Product

There are quite a few things to consider when planning for automated testing and designing your strategy. The process should follow at least these nine basic steps:

1. Where to start – By using the testing pyramid, you’ll be able to identify where you want to start testing. You should consider your main motivations for automated testing, and of the three benefits we listed in the previous section, pick the order of importance to you. From here, you’ll choose the automation relevant to these needs. 

2. Apply your familiar development principles – This means designing regression testing where you would normally include it, incorporating your whole team, and investing in training opportunities for those needing them by factoring in some hands-on experience and collaboration between testers and developers. Part of this process should focus on ensuring app stability before automation. 

3. Identify what should be automated and select your tools – Pick out the types of tests you want to automate. These should include repetitive tests and tests that run against different data sets and many units, components, and GUI-level tests. It’s not worth automating one-time tests, and exploratory tests will not be suitable for automation. From here, you’ll be able to identify the tools you’re going to use for the testing. 

4. Modeling and coverage – You need to know what you’re covering, but you also want to know how much you will cover and with which tests. Once you’ve identified and executed your tests, you’ll need to evaluate your results, so when designing your strategy, you need to have the relevant metrics in mind too. Don’t forget to look out for over-testing! 

5. Write the tests – Here, you’ll need to identify each test’s start and end conditions and record the requirements scenario into an independent automated solution with assertions. 

6. Run the tests – This is the execution phase, in which each test is run multiple times. 

7. Evaluate – At this stage, the evaluation is as simple as ensuring each automated test behaves as expected.

8. Publish – Share the results of the automated testing process with the team and encourage discussion and evaluation of the successes and failures (if any).

9. Adjust and repeat – Taking a trial and error approach, make the necessary adjustments and repeat the things that have worked in your test automation strategy so far.

That’s more or less all there is to designing and implementing a test automation strategy, but there are some common roadblocks you might want to know about.

Software Test Automation Strategy Challenges, Risks, and How to Avoid Them

The typical challenges that automated testing faces are usually budget or training-related and can be useful to know about in advance to try to mitigate them. Without a proper test strategy, you may fall foul of any of the following challenges: 

The initial investment can cause problems for teams on a tight budget. Implementing a new automation test strategy does take time and resources away from the day-to-day. Still, it’s best to consider it a significant investment in time savings down the line. Make sure to budget both time and money to design a robust testing strategy. 

Poor testing can lead to product and project risks. Many automated testing approaches lack clearly-defined goals, which can lead to aimless testing, over-testing, or simply not testing in the right way to make the best of the strengths of automation. It’s important in the modeling and coverage considerations of stage 4 to reduce these cases where possible.

It’s also common to have incomplete or improper testing tools to achieve the desired results, which emphasizes the importance of identifying your tools early on, usually as soon as you’ve identified what you want to test. 

One of the strongest benefits of the speed of automated testing is the ability to reuse code. Try to avoid spending all this time on writing tests that will be discarded as soon as you’re done and lots in a pile, never to be used again. Instead, make tests that are easy to recycle, and you’ll likely find that you can make use of them countless times.

Conclusion

Automating your software testing immediately mitigates the risk of falling behind when it comes to the development of new technologies. Still, other roadblocks will present themselves when it comes to test automation. 

Thankfully, with a bit of careful strategizing, you should be able to mitigate these risks easily and reap the rewards of a robust automated testing strategy, bringing you savings in time, money, and human resources as well as boosts to the quality and responsiveness of your software. A good software test automation strategy should be something you carry with you throughout numerous development projects.

Related Articles

• How To Mitigate Risks With Good Test Automation Strategy
• A Quick Guide Into What Is Test Automation
• Automated Testing Tools: Your Ultimate Guide
• Your Ultimate Guide to Automation Testing Frameworks
• The Impact of a Successful Test Data Management Strategy

Frequently Asked Questions

• What is test automation?

  It's the process of leveraging tools and software to execute pre-scripted tests on software applications to ensure they perform as expected. Without test automation, development processes depend on manual testing, where QA testing teams execute test cases, observe the application’s behavior, and report issues. 
  
  

• What are some of the issues that arise with manual testing?

  For one, humans are prone to error, and some bugs or issues with the application may go unnoticed unknowingly. Secondly, in cases where large-scale testing or repetitive efforts are required, manual testing can be time-consuming and drag the overall development time. Naturally, with increased errors and development time, the development cost increases.  
  
  

• What are some of the benefits of test automation? 

  The test automation process provides several benefits, including: 

  • Faster Time to Develop: Test automation reduces the time it would take for human testers to manually test a product by catching bugs and errors early in the development phase.
  • Cost-effectiveness:  Although test automation requires a considerably high investment upfront, in the long run, it’s more cost-effective, as it catches errors that would have gone unnoticed and saves the company from hiring budgets for additional human testing expertise.
  • Objective Results: Unlike human testing, which can sometimes be subjective, automation testing produces consistent and objective results, ensuring the reliability and efficiency of the end product.
    
    

• What do Engineering leaders need to do before creating a test automation strategy?

  Engineering leaders must analyze the existing testing process to understand strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for improvement within the current testing framework. Afterward, they should define the objectives of their testing process and review existing test documentation. This includes examining test plans, cases, and scripts to ensure they align with the software requirements. Leaders should also analyze how the development team executes tests, considering the time, steps involved, and any challenges encountered during manual testing. This way, they can pinpoint repetitive and time-consuming tasks that are prime candidates for automation.
  
  

• How can Engineering leaders select the best tools for test automation?

  Development processes require a combination of tools and frameworks when adopting test automation. Some popular automation tools and frameworks include Selenium, Appium, JUnit, TestNG, and Jenkins. If the project has plans to grow or expand, the tools and technologies chosen should support the addition of test cases, users, and functionalities without significant performance degradation. 

• Will Test Automation replace the human element from the testing process?

  No, test automation doesn’t eliminate the human element from the testing process. Rather, it transforms the roles and responsibilities within the testing team. As such, engineering leaders must first identify the roles and skills needed for the automated testing system and processes. An automation strategy’s success will depend on the team working to execute it.