Hurdle 1: Getting Approval From Top Management
There are many things within any department of company who keep
on asking to facilitate things which may not necessarily be approved due to
constraints on budget. Software testers are well aware that automating a
project will give benefit to both the IT and its business like reduced time to
market, increase coverage of test cases, precision, reliability, reducing the
per hour costing, coming across issues much earlier in the automation cycle
etc. However it’s a very difficult for the testing team to make the finance
department and QA stakeholders to allot the specific time and funding
incorporating automation testing in projects.
We definitely agree with experts that automation can pay off one
days by reaping its benefits. To convince the management that the financial
advantages are immense you need to show them a simple ROI (Return On
Investment) model for test automation, apart from the qualitative advantages
achieved from automating the tests.
It is critical to also be very open with all stakeholders, don’t
show them any rosy picture and mention that automation may not require efforts
up front, because you and I both know that it surely does require a lot of
efforts to automate scenarios initially but in the long run it should be worth its
say!
After doing Scrum
Master Certification in Pune, you will get yourself educated about
scrum, its framework, different words involved in scrum practices like scrum
principles, artifacts, sprints, events, daily scrum and many more.
Hurdle 2: Tools and Technology – Its appropriate selection
There are many instances where teams get stuck or don’t get past
this stage due to many reasons. The team may not have the required talent or
expertise to use a particular tool to its depth or maybe the tool which they
are looking for does not exist, as everybody is aware that no tool in the
market today can offer 100% test coverage and moreover even if a particular
tool does fulfill many of the total requirements they are expensive and its
cost exceeds the budget allocated for the testing project.
There are some ways which you can go through if you lack the
required know how on how to use any particular tool effectively.
1. Get one
consultant to train you who is master in using the tool
2. Try and
take up some online or classroom program to gain expertise o the tool
3. Try and
create a customized tool tailor made to suit your requirements from a development
expert team and learn it.
4. It may be
always faster and simple to recruit someone who is an expert in the usage of
the said tool for your automation project
Incidentally it happens to be that the tool is not covering all
scenarios you need you can consider an option of having a multi tool solution.
As everyone in this world is aware that its almost impossible to test
everything and anything, but you can certainly device a tool that can perform
most of the important tasks for you.
If the tool you figure out to be your one point solution but not
fitting into your budget do a quick expense Vs advantage analysis and submit
your proposal to your management for approval. You can back your case by
putting forth an example where the loss incurred by a previous issue you had
faced and show how much time and money you could have saved if you had this
automated solution before.
To learn the new way automation for Agile Scrum projects, it is
always advisable to have Scrum
Master Certification
Online or Classroom. You can do Scrum
Master Certification in Pune with SarvaShikshan® e-Learning
Hurdle 3: How to Start – Frame a Strategy
Now lets assume you have got all the required support, skill
set, infrastructure and tools in place to start automation. But the question is
what do you really automate and how it is to be done. The tools are dumb they
don’t tell you how to do it, they will get operated the way we operate them.
You need to have one thing clear in your minds that you cannot automate
everything so you must device a strategy to do it. There are generally 2 ways
to go on with it do a automation hierarchy / pyramid or risk based
automation
Risk based automation testing gives high preference to testing
components that are the most prone to failing and which also have the highest
negative implications if said failure does occur, you should take into account
financial implications, the possibilities of failure in consultation with the
development team, service level agreement.
This analysis should give you a good insight for prioritizing
the test cases to automate. Second approach which is generally highly
recommended is to follow the automation pyramid. Take an analogy of an ice
cream cone approach which results in the level of frustrations going higher
because it focuses the automation at the UI level. And as you might be aware
that UI level test cases are highly brittle and fragile which break easily. The
solution would be to focus on automated unit tests in which you are assisting
to avoid issues or terminate them almost instantly as you go through the SDLC.
Hurdle 4: Expectations from Automation to be more practical
You have to always remember one thing that how much ever
powerful the tool and the processes you follow are its never 100% complete.
Test automation should not be considered as a remedy or a one stop solution for
all the issues found in the product or program or project on which you are
applying it and should not be used in place of but there are certain automated tests
which unearth issues which otherwise would have remained hidden.
Test automation is really just checking of systems automatically
while human intervention is still required to perform the non automated tests.
Also one should remember that output of tests come from the inputs you provide
to properly test a scenario and not on the quantity of tests executed and also
not on the frequency of tests run.
You have to make sure that your automation team and management
are in sync and agree upon and understand clearly the possible results from
your automation plan so that everyone’s frequency matches
Agile Scrum as you know is being practiced in the current world
market of project management or product development or program management.
Similar is also true for automation testing considering the large no of
competition for each and every product. So each agile development wants to have
as much automation as possible in their product life cycle as possible to speed
up time to market.
With everyone planning on implementing automation into their companies
there are some hurdles related to automated testing that needs to be dealt with
before you head on with its implementation.
Doing Scrum
Master Certification Online or Classroom, if you happen to be in Pune
then Scrum
Master Certification in Pune with SarvaShikshan® e-Learning which will
help to enhance your career growth and job opportunities.
·
AMBER
CARDOZA – SMC
Currently
working as a Project Co-ordinator at ITC Infotech
·
ANURADHA
DILLIBABU – SMC
Was
working as a Project Manager at WIPRO
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