Motivation:
As we all know, automated testing is a great way to reduce manual effort since by this means we can leverage automation to replace the execution of tests by a human tester with virtual pipelines. So, we can eliminate not only a huge need for manpower, but also time and cost.
With such a great looking opportunity, why do we still have to spend so much time on QA activities even if we have automation? Being aware that automation is still very useful, perhaps the question we need to explore is, what doesn't it solve? Or what are the biggest pitfalls in building test automation itself?
In this talk, I collected my personal experiences focused on the challenges of test automation in global projects.
Common problems:
Some of the greatest common difficulties are:
- Coping with update/changes
- Code Duplication
- Tricky Behaviors which are not easy to automate
- Hardware in the SUT
- Time consuming executions
- Reproduction of the issues found during executions
Fundamental solutions:
- Smart automation strategy
- A good design pattern
- Utilizing execution patterns
- Well defined locators
- Parallelization
- Regular clean-up
- Test harness with necessary simulation
- Logging and saving evidences in the pipelines
Takeaways
After this talk, Attendees will be able to listen the discussions on:
- Challenges to cope with in test automation besides advantages
- Various possible risks in automating tests
- Potential solutions against pitfalls of automation