Software Testing Tips: How to Plan Automated Testing?

If you consider planning your automated testing, it should be a long-term one, including several issues that have to be thought over and a work perspective:

1. Ensure that all client configuration and setup steps are simplified at most and check the availability of well-structured documentation. In future, this check will win you more time than you spend on it.



2. If a software testing company has to hire a new tester or if contractors are brought in, no more than few days of introductory system examination should be given to them before they start performing automated testing.



3. One software testing company may employ only one or two automated testing engineers, another may prefer to divide automated testing between all of the workers. Performing automated testing a tester should broaden his/her mind on implementations and the feature areas. So it is quite logical to assign this to the feature owner or to create such a team so that after some time working, all of the workers start automating their fields of work thus imposing both, good software testing and programming practices. It also depends on the team composition and the workers’ ideas as to the implementation of various methods to the current project.



4. A good idea is to conduct code review or sample code walk-through before check-in. It will not only help in team education, but also ensure that codes and processes are possible to be maintained.



5. Software testing company engineers should take the automated testing seriously as it is a very meticulous work. Even the minimum change in the product can deny hours of somebody’s work. So always update your information about the product change to make sure you know when any of the automation change should be made.



6. In order to test only one condition at a time, make sure the scripts are small and atomic. Depending on what the automation framework is, you may also combine several function strings in order to complete larger tasks. Besides, in case of any change in product functionality, software testing company engineers will have to update only the atomic scripts that compose the larger tests. In case a small atomic case was broken, the same problem may be traced in about 500 other scripts. So by fixing that one small script responsible for the functionality of a product, you fix all 500 of existing faults.



7. If common functions are located in a centralized way, you have a chance to string them in various variations and avoid writing automation code twice for the same task, thus easing the problem of maintaining the automation scripts.



8. Planning for the next release is an important thing to do, however you should be careful with it. Of course, future plans are necessary and you would probably think about using this project scripts in the next releases thus lessening your expenses on them, but stop here for a moment and think of how many changes your product is going to go through in a process of time. You will definitely change some of the product’s interface, labels, hooks or technologies, so the scripts will not remain the same. Of course you shouldn’t write all the scripts anew with every coming release, the main idea is that you shouldn’t forget about the changes the product went through.



9. Always keep in mind the close connection between the automation process and the product code. If you scan the screenshots from one release to another and note the slight changes in graphic, make sure that you either change the screenshot or the code.



10. If you want your automated testing to go well, you need proper planning. If we are talking about Web testing, be sure that there are tag IDs for all objects that should be accessed through the automation scripts. Software testing company engineers should discuss this issue with the developers and check whether all of the tags are inserted, code is written and the objects are created. The main advantage of such a method is that you are not dependent on anybody and the ID can be modified by anyone.