As we know, automation testing plays an important role in development life cycle. It helps us reduce effort for manual testing, increase test coverage and shorten release to market time. When you have a huge system with a lot of applications, we need to pay attention to test management, reducing flaky test, test execution time, test environment management, script maintenance and resource skill, etc. Therefore, it’s important to make our automation testing activities scalable.
1. Common challenges in scaling automation testing
1.1 High initial investment
When applying automation testing in your project, the investment for it is high. It includes the cost of the tool, the infrastructure for testing and the price for skilled resources.
- If we use enterprise tools for implement automation test, we need to care about the price of the tool. Especially for the tools which require license for each user, we’ll need to spend a lot of money for the tool.
- In the real world, we usually run test on various kinds of platform and environment, so the cost for the infrastructure is high
- Automation tester become more popular now, but it’s still the rare skill. Therefore, the price for them is higher than manual testing
1.2 Test script maintenance
When we have a large project, we need to care about test script maintenance. When there are any changes from application, we need to update the test script. We should ensure that our automation is well organized so that we don’t need much effort in updating test scripts. Besides, wait handling is a challenge in automation test. If we don’t implement it in the right way, it will lead to flaky test which makes us spend a lot of time for re-executing test or analyzing test result
1.3 Team skill gap
For building a good automation project, we need to have the engineer who has good design skills. For maintaining the framework, the team need to understand it clearly. Especially, we need the new member to be equipped with necessary skill to reduce the onboarding challenges.
1.4 Data Management
For data management, we usually face the challenges related to:
- Manage test data for large-scale environments.
- Ensure data consistency and avoiding duplication.
1.5 Security
Security is important point in automation testing. If we don’t pay attention to manage test data, especially for important credentials, it will lead to data leaking.
2. Strategies to overcome challenges
2.1 Start with a strong foundation
We need to invest for building a scalable and robust framework. A good framework allows us to run test on various kinds of test platform and crossed browser, filter test case by priority/component or run test in parallel. The way we organize source is also important for script maintainability. Based on our best practices, OOP and design pattern are required in building automation framework so that we can avoid duplicated code and update script quickly. Besides, a well-organized framework will be easier for newcomers to catch up.
2.2 Leverage cloud-based solutions
Compatibility testing is required in most of the test strategies now. It takes of a lot of time for preparing devices or browsers for testing. For mobile devices, we’ll purchase a lot of devices for compatibility testing on real device. Instead of purchasing devices or installing browser manually, we can leverage cloud platform for scalable infrastructure. The popular tools like BrowserStack or Sauce Labs can support us to implement this.
2.3 Automate strategically
For test cases implementation, we need to define wise strategies and avoid “automate everything”. We need to focus on automating high-value, repetitive tests first. Besides, we should spend effort for identify and remove obsolete or redundant tests for reduce time for test execution. Maintain flaky tests also help us save time in analyzing test result.
2.4 Upskill the team
The team should be trained on the tool or frameworks. We can create the sharing or training section to share the best practices to team to improve the script quality. Continuously updating knowledge about new automation technologies and apply them in our project will make the working process more efficient.
2.5 Integrate with DevOps tool
We need to embed automation into CI/CD pipeline so that we get the status of product quality as soon as possible. Moreover, it also helps us utilize the resource. Instead of setting up test environments manually, we can add these steps into the pipeline so that we do this automatically. Beside saving effort, it also can help us prepare isolated and consistent test environments.
2.6 Leverage AI
Nowadays, AI becomes popular, and it also takes part in automation testing activities. We can leverage AI to generate test script, analyze result automatically, or design test case.
2.7 Monitor and analyze
Define metrics to evaluate automation activities and keep monitoring them to identify the bottlenecks on pain point in project. Based on analyzing them metrics, we can improve the process for automation testing.
Conclusion
While implementing automation testing, we need to pay attention to scalability. When our project grows up, we don’t need to spend a lot of effort to re-implement it. A good preparation will help us to save a lot of money for resources, tools and infrastructure.
Reference:
- https://vtitech.vn/automation-test/