In this blog, we discuss common automation testing failures we come across and how to resolve them. To get good results, you need to avoid wastage of …
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. We all know that test automation can work wonders for our business. It can help us reduce cost, save time and effort, get quicker feedback, etc. thereby directly contributing to increased productivity and maximization of profits. But to get good results from automation testing, you need to avoid mistakes as they can result in wastage of automation efforts. Now, you can learn from your own mistakes or learn from others’ mistakes and avoid making them. As best-selling author Roy H. Williams says, that’s the difference between being smart and being wise. To help you be wiser, we have enlisted a few mistakes that led to test automation failure and tips to overcome them. According to the World Quality Report, only 14~18% of organizations have basic test automation tools in place. Choosing the right test automation tool is of utmost importance to reap long-term benefits from automation testing. The test automation strategy should be built in a scalable manner, and the ROI should not be judged from short-term success. During the start of the testing phase, the tests being executed might look promising. Still, the scenario would change 6~12 months down the line as the tests may no longer be relevant, or the execution may take longer than expected, or the results might turn out to be flaky. A more worrisome factor would be switching to a new test infrastructure or test automation tool due to incorrect analysis of the tool currently in use. To make your test automation strategy successful, you have to avoid some common pitfalls and failures. With that in mind, here’re some of the common problems with automation testing that you need to avoid to build a long-term successful test automation strategy. No matter what type of product you have, it will evolve with time. New features will be added in an incremental phase; some of these features might also require changes in the User Interface (UI). Now, the user interface is the only way through which the user will interact with the website/web application, but the product is much more than what the user sees or interacts with! Multiple operations might occur in the background when the user clicks on a particular button, and it is essential to test each of those scenarios. While choosing a web automation tool, you mustn’t focus solely on user interface testing. The test process might be slow, and any change in the UI would involve significant changes in the test code and could lead to automation testing failure. Selenium automation testing can be used along with programming languages like Python, C#, Ruby on Rails, etc. to automate UI tests. The test code might involve significant changes to accommodate testing on outdated browsers like Internet Explorer (IE) since many features might not work on such browsers. Every change in the test code involves a cost, and the problems multiply if there are major changes in the UI. If you intend to test your product’s internal functionalities, opt for web testing on headless browsers. Headless browsers are web browsers without a graphical user interface. Since product development and testing phases are executed in parallel, it is essential to focus on both GUI tests and functional tests (that do not only have any GUI). Also, lack of proper communication between the web product stakeholders, e.g., planning team, development team, test team, etc. can cause a major disaster to the timeline of the product release. Hence, it is vital to keep all the stakeholders in the loop about the overall development progress. Regardless of the type of test automation tool being used, your team would still require some coding proficiency. The majority of the test automation tools support popular test automation frameworks like Cucumber, Selenium, Robot, etc. Your team needs to make the correct choice of test framework to get the best results from automation. For example, a test case that involves testing against a range of input values can be better developed and performed using the Hypothesis framework than other frameworks. Hence, you and your team should know the pros and cons of each test framework. Selenium test automation is very popular since it can be used with most of the popular programming languages. In case your team does not have adequate domain expertise or coding experience, it becomes essential to hire experienced test automation experts to groom the other team members. Otherwise, you will likely end up with a major automation testing failure. You would want to use the test code developed at the start of the testing phase during the later stage. Hence, the test code’s long-term maintainability and portability are extremely important to avoid automated testing problems. Only an experienced developer/tester can come up with such a clean, maintainable code. This is one of the major factors for automation testing failure. Whether you are developing web products for the end-consumers or enterprise, it would involve interaction with the web browsers. During the early stages of product testing, your team might be using a manual testing approach, which has many limitations. You cannot attain good test coverage since the number of tests may be limited or may not challenge the test infrastructure. Take the case of cross-browser testing; your team can verify your product against limited combinations of web browsers, operating systems, and devices. You can test on browsers installed on your system or machines connected to the network, but you can still not cover the entire spectrum of web browsers (and their different versions). The scenario will change when you shift the focus to automation testing or automated cross-browser testing. Using manual testing, your test team can execute tests a few times in a day, i.e., as long as the tester performing the test is in the office, you are neither challenging nor utilizing the complete test infrastructure. When you shift to Selenium test automation or automation testing in general, the number of tests being executed will increase significantly. To get the most out of automation, the test infrastructure on which the tests are executed should be responsive but having a responsive test infrastructure comes at a cost. The cost will rise as the product development and test phase progresses; not investing in the infrastructure will hamper the throughput of testing, leading to automation testing failure.
