Your Test Automation Framework Is Just as Important as Your Tools
With the complexity and magnitude of testing that needs to be done for most modern software teams, it’s clear that test automation is essential in order to ensure quality. You need to be able to automate certain processes in your mobile, Internet of Things, or embedded work.
With that in mind, plenty of software teams get stuck on the question of “What tools should we be using to effectively automate our testing?” When automation was still new, plenty of people were looking to standardize their setup in order to successfully automate their desktop, legacy, web, and mobile applications with a single tool.
However, according to Kalyan Konda, the president of Gallop Solutions, that way of thinking is well out of date.
“A lot of enterprises have come to sort of one understanding that it's almost impossible to find a single tool that can cater to all of their needs,” Konda explained in an interview with StickyMinds. “So more and more what we're seeing is that especially for the legacy ERP kind of obligations, people are depending on commercial test tool vendors, like HP QTP, but when it comes to mobile, browser, and web-based applications, we see that there is a lot of interest in open-source tools like Selenium.”
Boiling everything down to a single tool, while convenient, isn’t a smart or modern solution. You need certain tools for certain stages of the process—all of which should work in concert with your regular manual testing that’s still integral to software success.
However, if you don’t have the proper automation framework, the actual tools you use don’t pack near as powerful a punch. This framework allows you to better organize your reports and develop metrics through your test automation.
“Organizations have to put together a framework that sort of helps you to standardize all your test automation assets, irrespective of the tool that you're using,” Konda continued. “As a test team, you have a lot of tools under need, but when it comes to your test automation assets as an organization, you are able to drive all of them using a single framework and are able to see the results that are being produced by these different tools in a single format.”
You should take the time to choose the right automation tools that satisfy the needs of your projects. But if you don’t pair these tools with a solid framework, you’ll miss out on sweeping benefits that can lead to new success.
