More may not always be best. But in the world of examination mechanisation, it is. If you ’ re already automating some of your software tests, you likely want to reap even more from test automation.

If that describes you, keep reading. This post discourse several strategies for getting more out of automated testing — include but not limited to automate more tests.

What are the goals of exam automation?

Before discourse how to get more out of examination mechanisation, let ’ s identify the independent reason why you ’ d automate tests in the first property:

• Faster trial results

• Less manual try in running tryout

• Fewer specialized accomplishment or knowledge ask to run examination

• Optimized use of testing infrastructure

• The ability to test more variables with fewer personnel

• More consistency and systemization in software testing

The listing could go on, but these are the principal welfare of automated prove that we ’ ll discuss today by explaining scheme to leverage these advantages in outstanding volume by double down on automated testing.

Automate more tests

Pro tip: Tools like SUSA can handle this autonomously — upload your app and get results without writing a single test script.

Perhaps the virtually obvious way to get more out of test mechanization is to automate more of your trial. Few brass automatize all of their software tests, and there will always be some tests that you take to run manually. But if you ’ re currently automating, say, one-half of your tests, you could set yourself a destination in the new twelvemonth of increasing that number to 75 percent in order to reap the benefits of trial automation on a bigger scale.

To increase the portion of tests that you automatise, beginning by identifying which types of manual tests are the best candidates for replacement with automated testing. The tests that you run most oftentimes are usually a good choice, because automatise those will save you the near clip. You might also focalise on examination that demand special knowledge to run; automatize those will make it easy to perform them whenever you involve, without relying on a specific technologist who is conversant with a unique essay surround or procedure.

Run tests in parallel

No matter which proportion of tests you currently automate, running machine-controlled tryout in parallel will do much to help you increase the overall speed of your CI/CD automatize testing routines. The reason is obvious: When you run multiple tests at once, you get complete results faster.

The major challenge to parallel testing is a lack of infrastructure. If your test base is limited in size, you can only run so many tests on it at once. Cloud-based test infrastructure offers a solution in this case by allowing you to run a nigh unlimited number of tests at once.

Ask developers to assist pen machine-controlled test code

Another way to get automated testing smoother is to ask your developers to help write automated testing codification, rather than relying on your QA engineers solely to write it. Doing so will help you to automate more tests quicker. It may also improve the overall caliber of your testing scripts, because your organization ’ s developer are potential to be best at indite optimized code than are QA technologist.

After all, writing code is developer ’ specialty. They may not know the software testing frameworks you use, but they can believably learn them quickly, and assist boil out well-written code to run within them.

Standardize your testing strategy

It ’ s not uncommon for an organization to dip its feet into the waters of test automation in a haphazard way. You start by automating a few tryout, without having an overall plan in place for building a consistent test automation strategy. The result is often an machine-driven examination workflow that includes a variety of different frameworks, different cryptography way in test scripts, and so on.

Inconsistency is your enemy when you want to do things quickly, efficiently and at scale. Thus, in order to get more out of machine-driven examination, standardise your testing strategy is a full step. This might mean agreeing upon a common framework (or small radical of frameworks) for all of your automated tests. You can also standardize thing like the order in which tests run, how you manage test failures, and more.

Documenting all of these recitation in a location that everyone on your squad can access (not just your test engineers, but the unscathed squad) is a outstanding way to build a more consistent CI/CD test automation process.

Building continuous feedback into your examination strategy

Automated trial grant you to compose a examination once, so run it as often as you want without experience to look at the code. This set-it-and-forget-it feature is one key advantage of tryout automation.

But that doesn ’ t mean you should ne'er change examination code after it is written. On the contrary, you can and utterly should revisit your script on a continuous footing in order to update them. Are some tests failing repeatedly, or occupy long to run than they should? Are engineers scramble to interpret test resolution? Is your IT Ops team complaining about bugs that are not caught in testing and that reach production? Feedback like this should be reincorporated backward into the CI/CD test automation pipeline in the variety of better test code.

Conclusion

No matter how much test mechanisation is already benefiting your organization, you can constantly get more out of it. After all, we live in the age of DevOps, and uninterrupted improvement is one of our mantras. Don ’ t settle for what your test automation strategy is perform for you today; strive to implement improvements that will assist you to get still more out of CI/CD test automation tomorrow.

Chris Tozzi has worked as a journalist and Linux systems executive. He has particular interests in unfastened source, agile infrastructure and networking. He is Senior Editor of message and a DevOps Analyst at Fixate IO. His latest book, For Fun and Profit: A History of the Free and Open Source Software Revolution, was issue in 2017.