To reduce the daily time and resources spent on System and Application Testing, the era of Test Automation arrived, and it’s now being adopted by many organizations every year. With a lot of precise work handling, there is also a chance of errors. Any error made by the tester can result in test automation failure, and if things get out of control, it can even impact its ROI. You want to miss any potential mistakes. Take for example testing automation on just one browser leaves you vulnerable to problems with untested browsers. Using a tool made for cross-browser testing prevents surprises later on in your automation execution.
The best way to prevent such errors is by knowing the different automation testing mistakes and avoiding them every time.
Incorrect Selection of Tool
With the wrong tools, how one can do exemplary work is why it’s the primary mistake in test automation. Whenever we fail with the wrong tools, we sometimes witness failures in achieving the desired efficiency level even after checking all the required measures.
Apart from having a bucket full of factors that lead to poor tool selection and wrong decision-making, we have a few filter-out most common mistakes aside, these are-
- Improper analysis of the application under (AUT).
- The measurements of the required tools are not appropriately detailed.
- Test team’s undisciplined readiness and skill make it difficult to complete the process.
- Poor evaluation of tool capability and tool vendor.
- Not analyzing the cost-benefit analysis of all the necessary tools properly.
Before stepping into test automation, any organization can easily avoid the above mistakes by simply enforcing a complete in-depth process to evaluate vendors and tools. Moreover, a check or evaluation by the team who will use the tool for automation is a must for smooth and perfect adaptation.
However, we can’t deny the fact that one tool never meets all your requirements; here, a perfect selection and detailed evaluation can check if all your needs are met or not.
Trying to Replace Manual Testing
Automated testing can kick all testing problems in one go, but this isn’t wholly true. The practical scenario says automated testing can stand as a way to replace old manual testing methods, but few things can be verified only by the human eye.
For example, exploratory and usability testing is the best validation by the test team manually. The test teams know what functionality should be automated and what should not. They also know when to run the automated test cycles.
Note- We should not consider Test Automation a replacement for manual testers but a helping hand.
Confronting the CI/CD Pipeline
The widespread Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) speed up the software release cycle. Moreover, this CI/CD pipeline allows excellent functionality of continuously integrating small incremental code changes, testing them, and helping teams make them available to the end-users.
However, it sometimes happens that teams, for some reason, miss integrating test automation with the CI/CD pipeline, and that means wasting the total value of CI/CD tools or automated tests, in other words, not leveraging its exclusive features.
What other role does the Test Team have to play? The test teams quickly deliver quality to the market by creating automated build acceptance and integrating them with their CI/CD pipeline.
Maintenance
Any tool, software, or device needs maintenance after a certain period, and so what goes for the test automation? Test automation requires regular maintenance no matter how the organization handles it, like manual updates or automatic tools.
However, many professionals find it a waste of time and always look for the least effort maintenance for any automation tool. This will not work every time, and you have the responsibility to keep the maintenance on time for any automation tool.
A self-healing, capable automation tool for sure stands as the best and most helpful thing.
Record/Play Trap
Nearly all the recent mechanization equipment provides ‘record and play’ elements that enable consumers to establish automated writings for the respective scenarios rapidly.
Even though this is fascinating, the twist is that these automation screenplays are created with static information, wherein the consumer isn’t enabled to reusable features. Besides, equipment does not capture any assurances that are accomplished through the eye.
Moreover, a modification in the captured scenario occurs at each instant, and the test engineers would be required to record it repeatedly. Re-recording is prone to erasing any necessary dynamic information to import manually.
Nearly all automated tools provide an inbuilt record and then play feature that enables the consumers to practically interpret consumers’ activities on the request under test into computerized test texts.
Nonetheless, it provides an erroneous feeling that individuals could computerize their test scenes in a short duration, which is not valid.
This element must be utilized to establish the base scenes only and exercise beginner automation engineers. An individual must avert this record and play for vigorous, durable scripts when choosing a tool or automating a long-duration scenario.
Insufficient Test Validation
The second most critical aspect of testing is proper Data Validation. Any mistake in the data validation at all possible levels by the Test Engineers can lead to failure in test automation.
For example, you can find some functionality working perfectly when seen from the front-end, but in the back-end, that’s on the database levels, things are not working as expected. This happens at the data integrity level and, therefore, can lead to failures in the practical system.
However, this type of error can be easily analyzed and fixed by designing appropriate test automation scripts, which eventually validate the functionality at all levels, including the UI level.
Note- In AUT production, the prone to bug leakage is restricting the validation to only visible UI elements.
Mislaid Preferences
Test automation consumers frequently happen to mislead preferences, from automating experiments that are not often reiterated and poorly-valued use cases initially to computerizing tests for an application functionality that hasn’t occurred to be stabilized yet or isn’t prevailing as crucial.
Automation engineers usually are apt to computerize the most straightforward test cases before the others to indicate good advancement.
There are several means to computerize tests and equipment to assist accuracy and boost the time-to-market. Test automation is vital and must be constant with the respective business functions.
Nevertheless, one should not confide in small victories. Orient your business with the proper test automation tool(s) and specialists to improve test coverage and ROI.
How To Avoid Automation Testing Mistakes?
Test Automation is the best helping hand for the old manual testing process. Thinking of it as a replacement for the manual approach is incorrect as many mistakes may occur anytime when not done with focus.
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