Test automation has greatly benefited teams looking for simplifying regression testing and enabling faster releases. With the right test automation practices and tools in place, it becomes easy for development and testing teams to test the software and applications frequently and consistently. But test automation maintenance requires considerable efforts while dealing with test suite fragility because of frequent application and UI changes.
As per recent surveys, test automation script maintenance and constant changes in requirements are some of the topmost challenges for testing teams across the globe. Within large teams, maintaining a comprehensive test automation framework comprises 25-40% of the total efforts of the team. In addition to core maintenance efforts like troubleshooting environments, debugging failures, managing test data and documentation, and preserving stability through major code releases or infrastructure changes, roughly 15% of the test automation suite require changes based on the application updates. Supplementary to core test maintenance are unplanned efforts to diagnose pipeline failures, service outages in production, or other bugs that impact test effectiveness. This unpredictable but inevitable overhead can consume 10-15% time for automation engineers.
But the good news is, with the right strategies, it is possible to maintain the test automation scripts without much manual intervention. Our intention with this blog is to provide you with hands-on methods to cut down test automation maintenance efforts. Our team of automation experts have helped multiple teams across organizations to balance automation productivity with application quality and testing velocity.
1. Risk based automation based on critical business flows
Risk based automation works on the principle of identifying the most critical application workflows (the ones that will impact the user journey the most if they fail). Once these workflows are identified, test automation is prioritized for these workflows to maintain the superior user journey and less efforts from the testing teams. Some ways to identify the high-risk areas or workflows for any applications are complex transactional workflows, business critical systems integrations, financial workflows, past production defects, newly developed features and codes.
Risk based automation focuses on creating test scripts for highly critical business workflows and hence optimizes test creation and test maintenance efforts. With thoughtful scoping, it ensures business workflows with maximum impact on user journey are fully covered.
For instance, rather than automating peripheral application flows like forgot password or user preference settings, prioritize scripts on critical user journeys. This might represent only 20% of total flows but cover 80% of potential business impact.
2. Emphasize maintainability with automation suite
Designing the right suite is the perfect way to create easily maintainable test automation suite. Badly written test automation codes require continuous maintenance eating away the real benefits of test automation. Brittle locators, hard-coded test data, and duplicate code makes test scripts fragile. Instead of speeding up releases and testing, poorly written test suite slows down the development and adds up extra work, as a result, diminishing ROI and lower employee productivity.
Testers need to understand how modular frameworks and coding standards must be maintained to ensure easy test maintenance. Using modular architecture isolates changes and consistent coding standards help in understand test code and making the scrips self-documenting. Pairing this with keyword-driven development and testing minimized test scripts touches for modification, and if modifications are happening, they are easy to understand. Together, modular framework and coding standards shield test logic from application changes.
Setting up higher test code standards, maintaining up-to-date documentation, adhering and adopting best practices future-proof test automation efforts and save repeated efforts. The outcome is smooth test automation maintenance as applications progress. This can be done by adopting Testing Center of Excellence for your organization. Read more.
3. Selecting the right test automation tools
With advanced test automation tools, it has become somewhat easy for testing teams to manage their test automation suite. The inbuilt capabilities of these test automation tools have capabilities like runtime analyzers, AI-driven test maintenance, unit testing frameworks, CI-CD integrations and simulated environments.
Commercial test automation tools comprise of runtime analyzers that provide metrics about test cases, their execution trends, pass/fail rates, run time, and overall health of test automation suite. These metrics help teams in prioritizing maintenance efforts on frequently failing scripts. With capabilities like creating simulated test data and access to on-demand test environments – browsers, mobile devices/OS combinations available instantly.
Other methods like CI-CD integrations and ensuring complete feedback loops help in understanding script failures instantly and gives team enough information to fix issues earlier. At the development level, having defined unit testing frameworks for testing code increases confidence.
For test automation maintenance, it is important for teams to go beyond regular functional flows of the tools and look for features that also enable easy test maintenance.
4. Build reusable frameworks to extend maintainability
Test automation frameworks must facilitate interoperability and reusage across various applications and teams. With reusable frameworks, test maintenance becomes easy as common items like API interactions, test data operations, error handling protocols, simulated test data, device and browser utilities, visual helpers and more can be packed into reusable libraries referenced across tests. The major advantage of having reusable libraries are fixing them need one-time update across rather than modifying multiple scripts and understanding the consequences.
Test automation maintenance can further be accelerated by having interchangeable components like page objects, API clients, test data generators that can interface with any test script establishes reusability. Building once but integrating anywhere prevents rework when changes occur.
Building test pipelines that support testing across various channels like web, mobile, desktop provides shared integration. Modifications to pipelines automatically apply across environments reducing effort. In conclusion, building test automation frameworks should be one-time activity and hence testers must use reusable libraries, frameworks, channel agnostic pipelines to enable maintainable test codes.
5. Use Intelligent Automation Approaches
AI is making serious progress in helping testing team to cut down redundant efforts and time in tasks like test automation maintenance. With so many new-age smart automation tools, teams get head start in terms of generating test scripts by capturing user journeys and generate auto-healed scripts based on usage patterns. With this, machine learning helps in adapting test scripts as per the application changes and pipelines. Machine learning models can be continuously trained to understand site usage patterns, application changes, visual detectors, and healing scripts. As new code and features are pushed into production, ML continuously changes automation suite.
Smart and intelligent AI and ML models can also help in building optimal test plans that helps in reducing the repetitive work while ensuring the right coverage. Smart test automation tools are transforming test maintenance from auto-generation to adaptation to self-healing, and learning while continuously optimizing the testing codes. Teams must embrace these innovations given the rapid digitization of testing.
Create a Sustainable Test Automation Culture
Good teams release software faster, but great teams release high-quality software faster. Achieving high-quality software releases require complete focus on building superior experience, management buy-in and encouragement to try out new ideas, while making testing a shared responsibility for the whole organization. Technology leaders must work closely with teams to identify quality champions to enforce this culture from ground up.
It is imperative to promote knowledge sharing and peer reviews for continuous improvements and having a shared centralized function to ensure that all testing best practices are adopted. With this, it is also important to track automation metrics to showcase ROI and win management confidence. Test automation requires DevOps mindset with complete focus on collaboration and quality with continuous efforts towards institutionalizing automation across people, process and technology via a wholesome culture shift.
