Hello, everyone! My name is Valeriia, and I am a Business Development Manager at QATestLab. With an extensive background in working with test automation, I understand many businesses are holding back from automating testing, fearing it is a complex and murky process. 

I often hear clients say, “It’s so hard to automate testing; is it even worthwhile?” And my answer is yes, undoubtedly. I am here to bust the myth about automation quality assurance (AQA) being challenging to implement and utilize. 

In some situations, manual testing can feel like navigating a maze – time-consuming, repetitive, and prone to human error. Familiar with this, 88% of businesses have already implemented automation in their departments or plan to invest in automation tools soon. Moreover, for 43% of companies, automation is a key part of their quality assurance process, and 24% of organizations had an instant ROI increase once they started automated testing activities. 

For this article, I prepared a checklist for you to understand if you require test automation and a comprehensive guide on how to automate your testing in just 6 steps! 

When should you automate your testing process? 

To set up test automation correctly, it is necessary to determine if your project requires automation and why. It is a crucial step since knowing your goals will make achieving them much more manageable. 

The checklist will help you to define your requirements and quickly comprehend if test automation is relevant to your business. 

1. You have a long-term project. Such a project that lasts more than a year often needs enduring regression testing for particular components or functionalities. In this case, QA engineers should refrain from mightily re-testing every repetitive test by hand.
2. You have a team of a few or a single manual QA engineer. In such a situation, the responsibility for all testing activities lies in the hands of one or several QA employees, which overloads a team and increases the number of human errors. So that repetitive tests can be automated to release testers’ time for other critical tasks like new feature check-ups, re-tests, exploratory testing, etc.
3. Your product has a complex build with many components. Testing products with multileveled architectures manually can be challenging and error-prone, especially when dealing with many product components, integrations, APIs, libraries, databases, or microservices. 
4. You have a limited time for testing before the release. 73% of IT leaders believe automation saves about 50% of the time. By automating time-consuming tests, you will accelerate your testing process and reallocate time reserved for manual testing to other crucial assignments. 
5. You have a limited budget for testing. Only one AQA engineer might be enough to maintain a large amount of tests when all of them are already integrated. Automated repetitive tasks help businesses save money by evading repetitive manual activities and enduring maintenance.
6. You have to create testing scenarios that are hard or impossible to reproduce manually. Automation QA engineer is often the only solution. For example, during stress testing, it is necessary to create complex atypical scenarios, such as simulating the abnormal amount of users accessing software.

Download this checklist to keep it and optimize your testing process. You can also read an article from my colleague, who explained in detail which projects require test automation. 

Guide On How To Automate Your Testing Process

To demonstrate how we at QATestLab execute test automation step by step, I would like to present you our exceptional roadmap that covers the process of automating the testing from initial planning to full implementation. Despite test automation being complex, we could sort out the perfect way to simplify it. Applying our extensive experience, we developed this clear and comprehensible strategy ourselves, so we can now employ it while supporting businesses. 

Step 1: Create a testing strategy. 

When planning test automation for your project, it is essential to create a testing strategy to ensure its success and efficiency. A testing strategy is a document that outlines the approaches and the methods applied during testing, including its scope and objectives, communication and reporting channels, tools and frameworks, bug reporting and tracking, risks, mitigation, and other important components.  

Clearly focusing on the project’s goals and objectives will help it stay on track and achieve the desired outcomes. Another crucial aspect is estimating the scope of the testing to understand the required time frames, budget, workload and assess how many and of which level AQA engineers can cover all the project’s necessities. 

Step 2: Prepare the test environment.

An automated testing environment is required to run test cases, which combines software, database, and network configurations. The purpose of a test environment is to allow the QA team to check system components and uncover possible errors during particular scenarios and conditions. There are several types of environments, including development, testing, staging, and production. 

Firstly, you should choose the tech stack with all the tools and frameworks. Additionally, you need to pick browsers, operating systems, and hardware configurations on demand. In case you are unsure about which tech stack and compatibility set you require, QATestLab can assist you in making these selections.

Step 3: Develop, execute, and maintain automation scripts. 

A test script is a sequence of instructions to execute a particular test case based on test documentation created and maintained by manual QA engineers to execute a particular test case. Well-documented scripts make the development cycle easier for all: QA engineers, developers, product/project managers, and even software owners. Without test scripts, regression testing and recurring check-ups would be impossible. 

Test scripts save time and manual effort and guarantee a standardized approach to testing. Hence, even when the engineer is replaced by someone else, everyone still follows the same script, ensuring the tests are executed in the same way. 

While writing automation scripts, start with simple test cases and move to complex ones. Also, scripts should be continuously updated with each testing or development approach change. 

Step 4: Integrate tools and frameworks. 

To ensure efficient test automation, the testing tool must be able to integrate seamlessly with other instruments utilized by the project. This includes integration with CI/CD systems, issue-tracking platforms, and test management tools. 

Fortunately, today’s automation market allows you to choose and combine any tool and framework you consider the most suitable and easy to use. You can select from Selenium, Cypress, Appium, Cucumber, Playwright, and many others. 

Step 5: Develop and support automation tests.

Run automation frameworks and address any problems or errors as soon as possible. Yet, that is not all; automation tests need to be supported by AQA engineers and continuously enhanced according to the changes and updates of a product. Their effectiveness relies on ongoing support from testers who regularly review the scope, test strategy, and scripts. 

Step 6: Track, analyze, and present the results and reports. 

The proper result tracking gives an overall understanding of the performance and the effectiveness of test automation, shedding light on the areas for improvement. Also, it is vital to compare distinct results and see the differentiation tendency of the outcomes. 

Accurate reporting management helps to improve the existing tests. And, of course, in cases of AQA engineer or the whole team replacement, it’ll be much more convenient to brief them on the process. 

For example, our teams often use Allure on our projects, an open-source HTML test automation report tool. This software is simple and user-friendly, with clear results and the capacity to effortlessly manage reports. Just look at how we use it. Allure is a top voice, but there are also many superior reporting systems, such as ReportNG, Testim, and TestRail.

Final words 

Test automation is not just a progressive method of solving critical problems; it is also a must-have in many cases. Of course, none of the products can be tested by performing only automation tests, as many QA activities must be conducted manually. Another critical issue is the quality of automation, as inaccurate tests can lead to security issues, erroneous results, and increased testing costs and time consumption.

The materials we provide above are intended to help development companies understand their needs, check the relevance of test automation for their business, and demonstrate how easy its implementation can be. 
Still, there are many to discuss. If you have any questions, I will be glad to answer them all. Also, you can have a free consultation on a short call with me. Schedule a meeting by requesting a quote on our website or message me directly on LinkedIn to automate your testing in the blink of an eye.

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• Test Automation 101: Should The Programming Languages of Your Software and Autotests Match?
• Future of Automated Testing
• Calculating the Return on Investment (ROI) of Test Automation