Best Practices for QA Automation

Digitization and technology disruption has changed the way we manage the project lifecycles.

Agile too is changing the way products as well as applications are getting built. As today's customer is increasingly getting early exposure to the product under development, more focus is being centered to reduce the turnaround time.

Many companies across the globe are using automation as single solution for all their problems, but the question is, is 'automation' really working as expected.

While looking automation as the only solution, there are a few hints from my side to ensure that we follow the right path.

First and foremost, change the mindset of ‘Automation = UI automation'. May be with selenium or some other UI automation tools, it’s not the case. There are four major and many minor automations getting implemented across the testing community as follows:

• API Automation – it’s the service automation in which there is no need to check the UI
• DB automation – it is basically automation of the data validation and verification techniques
• Integration Automation – as systems are becoming more complex and many plugins are being used, integration automation has become critical
• UI automation – the traditional functional flow automation using tools like Selenium, HP-UFT, Coded UI, Appium etc

Besides these for the DevOps implementation, continuous integration and continuous testing are also being implemented. With this many companies have achieved significant success. Some of the use cases are:

• Amazon is making changes to production every 11.6 seconds
• Facebook releases to production twice a day
• Many Google services see releases multiple times a week, and almost everything in Google is developed on mainline

So, I am here to change your perception about automation and request every one of you to expand yourself to fit in the new generation QA practices. Scope of automation is huge and there is no end to it as new technologies will keep coming and will need new testing tools and techniques.

Its only wise to not lock yourself to the old testing practices. Be prepared and upgrade yourself with new testing tools and techniques.