A test manager or lead frequently wrestles with the questions of whether and what to automate in test initiatives. The question of whether this exercise has a Return on Investment (ROI) should be used as a general guideline in this situation. By discussing the decision-making procedure we followed on a recent project that was successfully finished at our firm, I'd want to demonstrate this. According to the project plan, the multi-tiered cloud-based web application testing would take place over the course of two months.
For the application's most recent version, there were a fundamental set of functional tests. While the development team created new features including UI screens and APIs, these tests would serve as the regression test suite for the functionality that already existed. The test team was debating how to create a framework for test automation to go along with organised and ad-hoc manual testing.
Over the course of the project, the test plan called for no more than two complete regression test passes. We came to the conclusion that there was no clear return on investment for UI test automation because of the total project's very condensed time limit of two months and the fact that the UI would be unstable for the first few weeks of the project.
The UI test automation option was rejected, therefore we moved on to the next automation choice, API test automation. We planned to add a few more Restful APIs, therefore we were looking at various already existing ones. The automation team felt more confidence in quickly developing a reliable test automation framework for the APIs because it was determined that the API layer was more stable than the UI layer.
Additionally, we recognised the chance to utilise the API test automation framework for Scalability testing as well.
By utilising the API test automation framework, we may possibly mimic various scenarios involving many concurrent users, producing load/stress situations, etc. We anticipated that continuing down the API test automation road would provide us with the needed coverage and ROI.
We were able to find scalability problems, memory leaks, and many other deeply ingrained problems by combining the aforementioned test automation method with manual regression and new feature testing at the UI level. In order to facilitate configurability of automation for future usage, we had created the API test automation framework so that it was extendable.
We were successful in releasing a stable, high-quality product at the conclusion of the testing engagement, in accordance with the predetermined schedules and budget. However, in order to attain the necessary ROI over the following several releases, we advised the end client to design a UI test automation framework to automate their UI regression testing for future test passes.
About AfourTech:
Established in 2007, AFour Technologies (a.k.a. AFour) focuses on Software Product Engineering Services comprising of UI/UX Design, Architecture Design and Consulting, Software Development, DevOps (CloudOps, SysOps and DBOps), QA (Test Strategy and Implementation, Test Automation Services, Performance, Security) and Monitoring. With an excellent track record of over 10 years and a focus on software product engineering, AFour is a true example of self-belief, consistency, and transparency.
AFour is ideation and technology house. Product companies associate with AFour for its product conceptualisation and technology skills in wide range of technologies like Java, Python, .NET, Javascript (MEAN), LAMP (Perl and PHP), Angular, React, C++.
The company is a hub of every cutting-edge technology in software product engineering services ─ Hyper-convergence, SDN, Virtualisation, Next Generation Data Center Technologies, Networking, Enterprise Mobility.
Till date, AFour Technologies has been able to bring together some of the best and brightest minds in software engineering.