Automation Testing Goals And Objectives: A Guide

Automation testing is not the goal of your department. So, rather than raising the script count, software testers and automation testers should consider the value the tests will provide to the company or product.

Test automation projects often fail because the people working on them have unrealistic goals, which is often the result of picking the wrong goals for automation. Some experts outline the qualities of effective automation goals to help avoid the traps many people fall into when setting automation goals. Initially, goals like "identify more defects," "conduct regression tests overnight and on weekends," "lower testing employees," "reduce elapsed time for testing," and "automate x% of the testing" appear reasonable and widespread in businesses.

While increasing the number of bugs found is a worthwhile goal for testing, it is not appropriate for automation, especially when doing regression tests. If the tests are worthwhile, performing them outside of normal business hours can be worthwhile.

Before starting a project, analyzing the goals and primary objectives of automated testing is essential. Let's learn more about this in this blog.

What Are the Goals of Test Automation?

Software testing solutions need to be dynamic to keep up with the rapid pace of modern software development.

Due to automation's time-saving benefits, more areas may be tested in less time. This frees QA professionals to focus on more complex jobs requiring human judgment.

Automated Testing Goals

Let's discuss some smart goals for automation testers here.

High-quality Software and Increased User Satisfaction

These two objectives describe the central purpose of software testing. Every QA team member employs a unique set of testing strategies and tools to satisfy a common goal: releasing bug-free software that consumers will love.

As a result of the unique methods used, automation testing helps in this process.

Reduced Testing Time and Effort

Wherever time-consuming manual testing is required, automation is used instead. It reduces the time needed to run tests and makes testing complicated apps with numerous features easier.

Quality Assurance engineers can set up the system, and once it is, it will begin operating automatically each night. Since automated testing allows for repeated execution of every test scenario, it is ideal for detecting and eliminating regression.

As a result, automation makes the most efficient use of time and effort.

Improving Productivity and Quality While Cutting Expenses

Long-term, it's always better to use automation, and it takes a lot of work to get things out on time and work perfectly.

QA engineers can run tests during off-peak times on numerous servers, in simulated scenarios, and so on. It will be substantially more work to run all those tests manually. Not ideal for a fast-paced job with strict deadlines because you will have to pay more and wait longer.

Automated Testing Objectives

The goals are more general aspirations, while the objectives are more specific tasks to help get us there.

Software Quality Improvement With Each Phase Of Revision.

Specialists in quality assurance use automated checks of software requirements between iterations. They also emphasized both bug avoidance and bug localization. To do this, it must account for every conceivable course of action the software might take.

Bug-repellent and error-prevention tools and well-written automated tests can save money in the long run.

We recommend reading our guide on the best test automation tools to use: Top 20 automation testing tools.

Increased Security And Reliability.

Understanding how an app responds under pressure and in seemingly impossible conditions (peak traffic, many users wanting the same functionality, etc.) may be modeled.

As a result, you'll be able to avoid slowdowns and crashes whenever possible. Any test-specific code is only used in a test environment and is filled in by the test itself to prevent the introduction of any additional hazards.

Better Comprehending The System Being Evaluated.

The term for the entity being evaluated is "system under test" (or "SUT" for short). We can investigate various "What if..." cases using automated testing, and the group would have to manually sift through the code without them. In its place, a QA engineer will activate a debugger, run a test, and observe the code's behavior.

Constructing Runnable Test Section

These tests need to be fully automated so that they can be done with little human input.

They must be repeatable, self-checking (able to discover and report problems automatically), and suitable for multiple uses. Quality assurance engineers need full autonomy to conduct tests.

Generating Easy To Maintain Tests

When creating automated tests, QA experts should focus on the actual testing rather than the code used to do the automation. Because of this, future examinations have to be simple to create, read, comprehend, and adjust. They should have a low maintenance requirement as the system develops.

Expanding Test Coverage

The goal of QA engineers is to test as much as they can. They must run hundreds of test cases to check for every possible use case, validate boundary and edge cases, and ensure everything works across all devices and browsers. It is possible to automate both functional and user interface testing.

Enhancing QA Engineers' Effectiveness And Motivation

We do not want to imply that QA engineers lack motivation or are inefficient. But manual testing is still a task fraught with the possibility of making mistakes, and it might be tedious to run the same test cases with minor modifications repeatedly. There is a great deal of tedious, low-level jobs to complete.

When routine tasks are automated, QA engineers have more time for novel and challenging problems like exploratory testing and risk assessment.

To learn more about the difference between manual and automation testing: Manual Testing vs. Automation Testing.

Boosting the Confidence of Your Team To Release a Product

Automated test runs give your team more confidence that the product is ready for release. Manually testing a system across a wide range of browsers and devices is time-consuming and laborious.

Additionally, it has a high potential for making mistakes. However, well-written automation scripts will carry out your tests without introducing any human error. In the end, this frees up time previously spent on administrative tasks, allowing testers to devote more attention to fixing the issues.

As much as feasible in DevOps should be automated so that testers may focus on exploratory testing to find defects, find new features, and record edge cases. Because of this, if there are no problems with the application, the automated tests will execute smoothly, boosting your team's confidence.

Avoiding False Positives and Negatives

If the application has a problem, the automation test script should fail. However, the advantages of automation testing will be lost, and the team's trust in the automated test scripts will erode if the scripts are prone to errors, which is why it's one of our top three goals for automated testing.

Preventing Unwanted Positive and Negative Results

We have succeeded as a top automated software testing business by adhering to these points.

Find capable test automation engineers and hire them.
Instruct your team in using standard coding patterns and best practices.
Prevent using standard code at any cost.
Put the peer review system into action.
Irregular tests should be isolated and readmitted to the execution pipeline only once they have shown to be stable and reliable.
Keep in storage all the test data needed for automated test execution to eliminate failures caused by insufficient or incorrect data.

Achieve Automated Testing Objectives with Ronwell Digital

As the shift-left movement toward DevOps becomes widespread in development, software testing engineers will need to innovate to stay up with the ever-quickening speed of development cycles. Developers must not only run an ever-growing number of tests to allow for more frequent code changes, but they also have to collect, analyze, and store the larger data sets that result.

Automation testing is becoming increasingly popular as a useful technique with well-established best practices. To be competitive in today's software market, businesses should automate the testing activities that take up the most time and whose absence is most likely to result in performance difficulties in the final product.

In reality, however, many development teams lack the resources to take on the massive job of creating automated tests that can aid in the creation of more secure and better performing systems. One effective way is using third-party solutions from providers with experience in all types and stages of automated testing.

Partnering with Ronwell gives you access to their extensive experience and knowledge in automated testing, which can be invaluable as you try to achieve your company's objectives.

Wrapping Up

One of the main objectives of an automation tester is to increase the number of automated tests to boost coverage. If you implement automation testing without first considering the system, goals, and objectives, you will not reap the advantages.

You must know how your scripting efforts contribute to the whole system, as automation testing is not a standalone process.