Thursday, 11 December 2014

Test Automation in Agile Methodology: A confusing hot cake !!

Agile is one of trend setter in market, most of the product based firms are using Agile Methodology. Whether to do test automation in agile project or not, is one of widely discussed but confusing hot cake. When we think about agile, the first thing comes to mind is flexibility, nothing is frozen and we can make the changes as an when those are required. So in initial some iteration the product design changes frequently. Test Automation requires some sort of stability in design and layout of the application. And if the design changes the automation team needs to struggle repeatedly to maintain the automation scripts. 

We need to have a close co-operation between development team and automation team. We need to develop the automation scripts in such way that application lay out change have minimum impact on coded scripts. One of the ways can be, instead of capturing the objects in object map or repository along with parent child hierarchy, we should descriptively find and use the object with help of locators like .id, .name, .text etc. Thus if developers are not making changes in any of these properties of object and only the parent child hierarchy is getting changed because of addition or deletion of some objects in application design, still the automation script will run smoothly.

As the applications get matured and the design achieves some threshold stability, test automation starts paying you back.
Usually automation is separated from development and considered as a side activity of testing department. Sorry to say but often it is thought that anyone can do test automation using code less and script-less frameworks available in market. But automation does require programming knowledge, it does require planning. Many time teams even do not do the proof of concept and feasibility analysis before start automating the tests. That’s why many times we do not succeed in test automation.

Well planned and skill-fully developed test automation always has high probability of success.
Automation is like a mutual fund investment, if we start looking of for benefits in short term, we may or we may not succeed but if think of long term return over investment and plan it skill-fully, automation will surely pay back.

Please feel free to share your thoughts and suggestions.

Thanks and Regards,      
Anupam Kumar
er.anupamkumar@gmail.com 

http://eranupamkumar.blogspot.in/

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