Test Automation and When Enough Is Enough
There are seemingly endless reasons why your test team might need to make use of automation. Whether you’re working with a web or mobile app that’s expected to bring in thousands of users simultaneously, your application contains code that’s changing frequently, or you just have piles of tests that need to be run, automation can be invaluable to your success.
However, even if we’re at a point where most people agree you need some sort of test automation to compete in today’s rapid, agile landscape, using automation indiscriminately will lead to way more headaches than benefits.
Not only do you need skilled testers, a sizable initial monetary investment, and a stable application in order to institute automated testing into your process, you also need to understand the risks of automating too much. Even if automation can act as the best use of your time and resources, you don’t want too much of a good thing.
In an interview with StickyMinds, technology and organizational consultant Dan North explained how you need to be more deliberate with your testing in this agile world. We can’t just automate for the sake of automation—we have to discover what works and plan from there.
“We tend to automate indiscriminately. This is a result of having an arbitrary goal of ‘automation,’ driven either by a test coverage metric or just the received wisdom that ‘automation is good,’” he explains. “Automation is just a technique, and like any other technique, it can be used well or poorly, and can provide benefit or hindrance.”
When is the right time to automate? If you ask most experts who deal with this question on a daily basis, you’ll hear that you should automate your testing procedure when you have a lot of regression work. Additionally, you should automate load testing work for creating virtual users to check application capacity, as well as when your GUI is nearly frozen yet you have frequentl functional changes. There are absolutely proven practices to follow if you’re new to the automation game.
Of course, like most anything else in the testing world, automation is best understood and used on a case-by-case basis. If you want to incorporate automation and don’t know where to start or currently use automation but aren’t seeing the right results, take a step back and remember that being deliberate in your choices is infinitely more helpful than following a manager’s order of “automate now.”
