Notes on Sauce Labs presentation, "Future Proof Your Automation" by QASource

From the Sauce Labs Webinar section:
https://saucelabs.com/resources/webinars/managers-future-proof-your-automation

"If you’re finding it difficult to automate tests for new features, and/or a significant number of the bugs your team finds are false positives, you should consider future-proofing your automation. Join us for our upcoming webinar, where we'll feature presenters from QASource as they present 'Managers, Future Proof Your Automation.'

"The webinar will focus on a 'future proof' automation suite that:
• "Has an adaptive framework
• "Efficiently automates new features
• "Can be easily maintained
• "Reduces false positives
• "Is long-lasting

"In this webinar, Rajeev Rai, CEO of QASource, and Rick Rampton, Head of Client Success at QASource, will share techniques, strategies and processes that will make your automation future proof".

Presentation given by QASource, an Outsourcing Service for QA

Seven Steps to Future Proof Automation

If you wish to future proof your automation, there are seven strategies you must implement:

• Automation Scope Review
• Evaluate Best Suited Tools & Techniques
• Automation Design Strategy
• Script Creation Strategy
• Execution Strategy, Reporting Strategy
• Maintenance Strategy

Managers, Future Proof Your Automation from Sauce Labs

Automation Scope Review

Automation should not be developed to use just once and then sit on a shelf. It should be used again and again.

Decide:

• What can and cannot be automated?
• What should or should not be automated? You cannot automated everything.
• Would it be quicker and more valuable to manually test something?
• Would this test be run regularly? Good candidate to automate. Run four times a year? Not a good candidate.

Evaluate Best Suited Tools & Techniques

There needs to be collaboration between DEV and QA to find the best tool. Pair it with what the developers are using. If automating an AngularJS front-end, Protractor and JavaScript may be a better tool than Selenium WebDriver / Java.

Need Mobile applications in the future? Know that Selenium / Java may not be the best solution since it does not do Mobile.

Automation Design Strategy

You want to decide what you want to use for:

• Test Data
• What type of Global Configs and Test Driver
• What Page Objects to feed into Test?
• What is the scheduling?
• What are the reports going to look like?

Note, you want your framework to be:

• Loosely coupled
• Customized Actions
• Global Configurations,
• Application Independent Utilities
• Test Data Parameterization: Data independence

How do you want to identify the web elements you are interacting with?

• ID? Class? Link? Name? Tag? CSS? Xpath?

Also:

• What is the framework development process?
• What is your strategy for writing the framework?
• Building an automation framework is building a software project: How to code commit, how to do code reviews, how to develop the framework?

Create a living document showing your framework development process.

Script Creation Strategy

Remember: A Record and playback is never enough.

• Script Mapping strategy.
• Script Pattern Strategy
• Script Commenting Strategy
• Independent tests
• Unique Test Data
• Exception Handling
• Controlled States
• Tear Down
• Soft and Hard Assertions

Execution Strategy

• You need to take a test suite, break it up into different groups, and run these groups of tests in Parallel.
• You also need a way to re-execute any errors.

... What are you capturing in Reports?

Reporting Strategy

Reporting is very important. What type of reporting works in your organization? Who needs to be informed? How do you frame the report to answer questions about what is happening with the testing? Are they looking for a Dashboard, to Drill down as results, to have Analysis? Should the results be emailable?

Note: You cannot improve what you cannot measure. You need good automation strategies, and find good metrics to work with.

Maintenance Strategy

How can you maintain your scripts? How do you deal with flaky tests? How do you know it is not a flaky test, but is instead an error that sporadically keeps on happening?

Flaky tests: Fails inconsistently wasting developers and QA engineer’s time. It damages the reputation for automation.

Don’t turn them off, Isolate the flaky tests into a separate group.

Checklist: Is Your Automation Future Proof?

• QASource also publishes a free 22 point checklist which talks about the techniques and processes you should follow. It is downloadable after subscribing to their mailing list at https://info.qasource.com/checklist/is-your-automation-future-proof

Want more Webinars from QASource?

See https://www.qasource.com/webinars

• Clean Up Your High Maintenance Test Automation Framework
• Measuring Your Way To Successful Automation Webinar With Experts
• Reducing False Positives Webinar With QASource’s Webinar

QASource: Reducing False Positives in Automated Testing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bi8hDBoZMPY

Happy Testing!

-T.J. Maher
Twitter | LinkedIn | GitHub

// Sr. QA Engineer, Software Engineer in Test, Software Tester since 1996.
// Contributing Writer for TechBeacon.
// "Looking to move away from manual QA? Follow Adventures in Automation on Facebook!"