10 Key Factors for Successful Test Automation

Most people in the software world have tried automating functional testing, with varying levels of success.
Reasons are in plenty when it comes to organizations failing to achieve the potential benefits of test automation, both management and technical.

But the question still stands tall, what are the factors that influence the success of automating a test?
10 Essential Factors for Successful Test Automation
Build a Dedicated Team: Having a talented staff includes professionals along with the newest and smartest graduates from local universities.
They can greatly help you with guaranteed quality you expect.
A flexible staffing facilitates you to format your team according to your changing business demands.
There are various sites that provide you with the best solutions to eliminate your recruiting process.
They will provide you with the best people and the best price at the lowest market cost.
Selecting Tool: The bests approach is to use a selection process that is completely tailored towards your requirements.
Now, what happens when you do not try a logical evaluation of the best-automated testing tool for you? Well, it can result in the selection of a wrong tool or a sub-optimal tool.
By the wrong tool, it means that the tool is not at all suited to your particular requirements.
One of the biggest challenges that an automation tester has to tackle is the appropriate tool selection.
First, identify the requirements; explore various tools and its capability.
Set the expectation from the tool and go for a proof concept. Selecting a wrong or a sub-optimal testing tool can lead to the loss of licensing fees, effort spent and automation opportunity.
You can look for the best-automated testing tools such as Selenium, Waitr, Wapt, Apache JMeter etc. This will help you to meet your specific requirements for testing.
Automation Framework:  It’s a misbelief that if you select the right tool you can automate anything.
A framework is a set of automation guidelines which helps in maintaining consistency of the testing and less maintenance of code. It also improves reusability.
Generally, there are four types of frameworks used in software automation testing such as:

• Data-driven automation Framework
• Keyword driven automation framework
• Modular automation framework
• Hybrid automation framework

Choosing an appropriate framework can greatly help in making your automation successful.
Measure Metrics: Success of automation cannot be determined by comparing the manual efforts with the automation effort but by capturing the metrics like percent of defects found and productivity improvement etc.
Metrics matters to people because this is how you justify investments and QA.
Many people struggle when trying to justify why they should invest in a test automation solution versus manual testing.
One of the first things to look at is what number of hours or annual savings you get from a manual or scripted test.
There are few things to look at such as:

• SAP transport impact analysis
• Defect reduction (reduce production defects by 60%)
• Improve productivity with automation
• Accelerate time to market

Finding The Right Tool: Usually, the conversion between people regarding, implementing automation, begins with tools and frameworks. Selecting the right tool and appropriate framework is certainly important.
However, they are only part of the solution and not really the place to start the discussion.

If you want to be able to sustain a successful automation function, you either need to be very lucky or should have a good plan.
It is rarely seen, organization talking about the vision for automation because their aim is to automatically execute tests.
There is nothing specific about what that means or what the benefits might be. What that leads to is jumping right into picking the tool and building a framework with no overarching objective to guide the development or the roadmap.
Therefore, take the time to think about what you can achieve with automation.
Moreover, it will help you to make the strategy and development of the solution much more valuable.
Budget Cost and Process: A dedicated budget is essential which includes costs related to the test tool, development, resources, and training.
Additionally, the maintenance cost for automated tests and tools must be included.  Also, a well-defined testing process is crucial as it defines the test-coverage.
It should be a well-defined quality control procedure and test execution and should define test criteria at each stage.
Preference of Tool Selected: A major factor which impacts the selection of the test tool is the technology utilized for application development.
For Example, QTP will never support informatics. Therefore, it cannot be used for testing informatics applications. It is a good idea to conduct proof of concept of the tool on AUT.
Well, selecting the right tool can be a tricky task. There are a few criteria that can greatly help you in selecting the best tool according to your requirement such as scripting language used.
It will also support numerous types of test including functional, test management, mobile etc. Moreover, it will maintain the support for various testing frameworks.
Automation cannot be Done for Everything: Scope of automation needs to be determined in detail before the start of the project.
There are few criteria that are used for selecting those test cases to be automated such as test cases that are:

• Executed repeatedly
• Are difficult to perform manually
• Are time-consuming
• High-risk business

On the other hand, there are a few categories of test cases that are not suitable for automation.
For example test cases which are:

• Newly designed and not executed manually
• Whose requirements change
• Are executed on an Ad-HOC

Reducing Time for Testing and Test Automation: Reducing your testing time is one of the most important objectives.
However, the thing that normally makes testing take a long time has nothing to do with the automation.
What makes testing takes a long time is the fact of finding bugs. The bugs have to be fixed and the process is repeated again.
Maintenance of the tests may take a lot longer than the maintenance of the manual test. Step- up and executing may also take longer.
Moreover, Analyzing failures and clear-ups may take significantly longer time. Ideally, you should have all activities associated with more matured automation that takes less time and indeed you will be able to do testing in less time.
So, reducing testing time might be a long-term goal for test execution but it may not be that easy.
Automated Maintenance: Automation scripts need to be added to the system that is under test with successive cycles.
Also, they have to be thoroughly checked and maintained for each release cycle.
Maintenance is essential in improving the effectiveness of automation scripts.
How can automated maintenance help you? Use automated tasks to simplify routine duties such as restarts, cleaning out temp files and defrags.
By automating patch management, you can ensure that your client’s machines are up to date with the latest software patches and ensure system stability.
Run scripts from the library or upload your own custom scripts. Schedule scripts to run one specific date of the week or the month or even trigger them to run automatically after a failed monitoring check.
If you are not familiar with the script, no worries! There are various communities like Fixit Scripts that has a lot of useful scripts to help you.

Taking everything into account, the right selection of automation tool, testing process, and the team are important players for automation to be successful.