Effective Test Automation in an Agile Environment

The dynamically changing IT industry brings forth new objectives and new perspectives for automated testing in areas that were brought to life in the recent decade, such as cloud-based, SaaS applications, e-commerce, and so on. The past five years saw an immense growth in the number of agile and Scrum projects. Additionally, the IT market has changed significantly, not only with various new tools (e.g., Selenium 2, Watir WebDriver, BrowserMob, and Robot Framework) but also with approaches that have also completely changed. For example, more focus has been placed on cloud-based test automation solutions both for performance testing and functional testing. Cloud-based testing of web applications is now replacing "classic," local deployments of testing tools.

Even though there are a vast number of benefits to automated testing, test automation can often fail. Some types of mistakes in test automation may include selecting the wrong automated tool, incorrectly using the tool, or setting the wrong time for test creation. It is worth paying special attention to the test automation framework and proper work scope division between the test automation and manual testing teams. The "Test Cases Selection" section of this article highlights many reasons why we must not automate certain test cases.

Let’s take a closer look at the five most common mistakes of test automation in agile and their possible solutions.

1. Wrong Tool Selection
Even though the popular tool may contain a commendably rich feature set and it's price may be affordable, the tool could have hidden problems that are not obvious at first glance. For example, there may be problems like insufficient support for the product and a lack of reliability. This occurs in both commercial and open source tools.

Solution
When selecting a commercial test automation tool for a specific project, it is not enough to only consider the tool’s features and price; it's best to analyze feedback and recommendations from people who have successfully used the tool on real projects. When selecting an open source freeware tool, the first thing to consider is the community support, because these tools are supported by their community only and not by a vendor. The chances to correct arising issues with the tool are much higher if the community is strong. Looking at the number of posts in forums and blogs throughout the web is a good way to assess the actual size of the community. A couple good examples include stackoverflow.com, answers.launchpad.net, www.qaautomation.net, and many other test automation forums and blogs.