The Importance of an Integrated Test Automation Plan
Adopting the latest and greatest market attraction—whether it’s an entire methodology like agile or an individual tool—is a bigger decision that you might imagine. It’s easy to see another company find success with a new tool, buy it, and tell your team it’s now a part of the process, but the potential pitfalls of poor planning in this area are too great to ignore.
When it comes to test automation, it’s critical to incorporate an integrated test automation plan instead of piling together a mishmash of unrelated tools with the hope to create some taped together mess of a plan.
Michael Sowers, the CIO of TechWell and a long-time tester, compares this process to building a home or remodeling a room. When you first set out to architect a structure, you need some sort of plan—whether it’s a hand-drawn blueprint or a mental map of how you want everything to look.
You wouldn’t grab a hammer, some wood, and just hope it all turns out. You need to have an end state in mind, and the same can and should be said when you integrate test automation tools into your team.
“How will our test management tool connect with our agile project management tool? How will our test execution framework integrate with our test management tool or our build tool, or continuous testing?” he asked in a recent interview with StickyMinds. “What tools will connect together to track traceability between user stories or requirements, and test cases, and the actual code that implements the features or functions? Most of us have existing tools, and then maybe we want to try out or add new tools.”
Tearing out old tools that have served a purpose for months or even years in favor of something your test teams have no experience with is rarely the answer you’re looking for. Integrating test automation tools isn’t an easy task, so you need a solid automation plan if you have any hope of increasing overall software quality.
“We really need an architectural diagram. We want to understand our twelve-month, eighteen-month, twenty-four-month plan on how all those are going to fit together,” Sowers continued. “Offer some common workflows, and talk to one another, integrate with one another. We get the gains, we get the efficiency and effectiveness out of that collective tool set.”
New tools can result in better automation and a happier team. However, if you don’t have a smart plan in place to introduce these tools to your current testing system, you’ll likely see less progress and more headaches.
