It’s clear that testing in the agile world is changing. The time to automate has arrived. The choice is simple. Either embrace continuous delivery, automate your testing and increase the overall quality of the software, or be left behind as others reap the benefits. Automation is critical for delivering exceptional software. But, it’s the wrong tool for every project. That’s why we created a powerful platform for automating your testing efforts, enabling your QA team to spend more time on strategic testing efforts which produce the best results.
The world is becoming more advanced… and faster! Our modern lifestyles have pushed companies to implement agile development practices, bring products to market sooner, and introduce new tools and technologies to make teams more efficient – like automated testing. We understand how difficult it can be to perform all the necessary test checks for each release and why testing automation is still often considered merely an option. Things have to change. Manual testing can be time-consuming and expensive. It’s a big undertaking, and many development teams are slow to move their testing from manual to automation. Automating your software testing is essential, but many teams struggle to make the transition because of a shortage in the skills they need. A hybrid-minded approach can help reduce costs and increase quality. Hence today we are talking about a few easy ways to automate your remote testing team!
- Strategizing the automation process
A well-designed automated testing strategy is instrumental for your company to maintain a high-quality product and avoid technological failures. This results in fewer setbacks, less time spent on fixes, and more time on development. Automated testing helps your dev team avoid technological failures and last-minute tests, meet deadlines without delays, and allows your development team to build features more efficiently and consistently. If you are looking to implement an automation framework but are short-staffed in terms of your development team, or you just don’t have the resources to hire an individual test automation engineer who can act as a point person and manage the project internally, hiring a remote test team maybe your best option.
- Make sure you have a clear understanding of tests that can/cannot be automated
Consider your priorities. What are the most important tests? Which ones should be automated? Preferably, the ones that take the longest time to run should be automated first. Unless your automation goals prioritize test flexibility, consider prioritizing UI tests over unit tests. This will allow for more comprehensive tests that are less likely to break easily with a code change. To reduce the human effort and error involved in testing, we automate tests. Tests that are well defined and that contain enough steps to be broken down into multiple automated test cases are the best for automation. Tests that don’t repeat themselves can be automated. An example would be inputting a variety of strings into a text field and then checking if the output matches what we expect. Another example would be to type in the same character over and over. In short, automated tests are best for scenarios that you’d ideally like to execute multiple times in a row (always under the same conditions) and that you’d ideally like to execute with zero manual interaction.
- Define the members of your automation testing team according to the roles they play
The best automation teams have more than one perspective. Some members may be better at coding, while other team members may have deeper business knowledge and insight. The key is to find the balance of perspectives that will most benefit your business. A composition of various perspectives and skills is vital in an automation team. It’s important that the right people with the right set of skills are put together on a team. A perfect automation testing teams represent a diversity of thought. While many people can perform an automation test, including developers, it’s the relationships and backgrounds that bring diverse perspectives. Talent should be used to complement the business goals, and not as a commodity. It is not simply the sum of their parts, they are a group of people with complementary skills, ideas, and perspectives. When it’s time to get down to work, we focus on getting tasks done and winning over hearts and minds – not checking boxes indicating titles on a resume.
- Will you need to make any alterations to your automation team later?
The moment you envision an outcome powerful enough to build a business around, you will need to start assembling a team of experts. Your team may have different members and a different leader at each phase of your remote automation journey. Once you have the right people on your team, you’ll need to consider their duties. These responsibilities will shift in terms of roles and responsibilities as the phases of your automation processes mature and new issues arise. Your team is trained on these changes and will raise red flags if they feel overwhelmed by the additional workload or believe someone else should be responsible for certain parts. The people you need to build your strategy will be diverse, and some roles or experience levels may need to shift. You’re going to need to have a team that is flexible, dedicated and open-minded. When one project ends, you are going to need your team to seamlessly jump into the next thing without skipping a beat. The people on your team will need to know their responsibilities intimately, but also be flexible and able to roll with the changing priorities.
- Preparing a test automation model
The best test automation teams smooth out the bumps and grow alongside the company. They create products that measure quality and reduce risks for the people who use them. Here’s how to assemble a great one. They are like internal quality and risk management departments for your company. An effective test automation team works closely with the development team to produce repeatable processes. Automation teams should focus on creating solutions that not only reduce time to determine if a feature is working correctly but also make the quality of a program easy to measure. Your team should contain:
- A dedicated team of developers led by a senior architect with significant experience managing other developers. This person is a hands-on manager who enjoys helping new recruits learn the ropes. He or she has prior experience building and maintaining large-scale software systems and is well versed in requirements gathering and testing methodologies.
- A junior-level engineer is responsible for the maintenance of test automation. This candidate would be trained on current automation frameworks and tools, ultimately learning how to write test automation code.
- The infrastructure team will focus on the development of monitoring, logging, and alerting infrastructure including validation of the security practices.
- Automated testing provides some interesting challenges for those specializing in niche areas such as analysis, project management, and administration. It is a great opportunity to diversify your skillset and work alongside a different cross-section of the team. Niche specialists are needed for responsible for configuring, developing or managing test scripts to execute automated testing.
- Using an Automation Testing Tool
Now, there are a number of test automation tools that are available in the market, however today we will talk about LambdaTest, the tool I have hands on experience with. LambdaTest is an easy-to-use Selenium based testing tool that can be accessed from any computer. It allows you to run your Selenium tests on 2000+ real browser and OS and the best part is that you can even run those tests in parallel. This increases your test coverage at the same time reduces the execution time of the tests.
Automation testing is a crucial part of any comprehensive QA strategy and LambdaTest makes automated testing easy. LambdaTest customers can get started with Selenium API compatible Selenium Webdriver scripting in minutes. With LambdaTest, you can automate your Selenium tests in an easy manner. The cloud-based, scalable Selenium testing grid comes at a low cost and provides one of the best platforms for your test execution.
