The transition from traditional ways of testing to contemporary methods makes it highly challenging for organizations in many ways. Even with the best practices in place, there may be demerits that may lead to loss of time or efforts in the realm of constantly evolving software testing. One may not always be able to enjoy the benefits of automation testing like accelerated delivery, improved quality, and reduced costs. Chances are that the organizations fail to find answers for questions that help them choose the right kind of automation solutions to resolve their challenges in software testing. The following are some of the reasons that can be responsible for the failure in adopting automation testing methods.

Identify the Applications for Automation Testing

Not all application software needs to be automated. Ever heard of automating all the useless tests and ignoring the important test cases? Organizations need to have a clear idea of what are the products that require test automation since automating everything may be expensive and can easily result in spending a lot of time writing scripts, testing, and then frequently monitoring. It is best to figure out what is worth automating and then start implementing automation where it can create the most impact. Think of a web application that involves complex features and trying to develop it manually can be more than just tedious or even impossible. In such scenarios, automation is the best choice to build an error-free application.

Knowing When to Use Automation

Today, many companies consider testing as a process that occurs after development. Only after the whole development is done, QA teams start testing the software. This kind of QA approach cannot result in developing high-quality software since it does not allow the testers to test all the layers of the software and there’s barely any time left for testing which can be a catastrophe for the QA teams. To avoid that, the testing process should be done along with the development. For your test automation to be more successful, you need to start running the tests right from the early stages of the development and throughout the entire software development life cycle. Testing is a crucial part of the continuous delivery pipeline and without test automation, there cannot be a successful CI/CD implementation.

Lack of QA Guidelines and Reusable Solutions

There is nothing horrible than each tester using their own style of testing or handling the testing framework in a QA team. A good QA process refers to that every member of the team understands the requirements and performs the assigned tasks according to the given guidelines or standards. Precisely, the team is expected to follow the guidelines to ensure that every action is performed chronologically, every detail is carefully implemented and the overall process is consistent to cautiously avoid any negative impact on the end result. QA guidelines have the most capability to increase the legibility and maintainability of test automation suites during the development of the software by defining a set of guidelines.

Similarly, applying reusable solutions can help QA teams to start testing a new project anytime. But, without reusable solutions in place, starting a new project could be very time-consuming and expensive. By doing this, QA teams can easily re-invent the test creation and execution process. Also, it makes it easy for the team to easily achieve application stability by leveraging the hard work you have done already.

Usage of Irrelevant Tool/Framework

There are plenty of automation tools and frameworks available in the market and it makes it really difficult for organizations to sometimes choose the best. They often fail to pick the right one since they don’t clearly understand the requirement or the solutions for their challenges. Automation testing depends solely on the tool and framework you deploy and each one has its own capabilities. However, in many cases, the QA teams lack the level of expertise required to leverage the best of these. Also, they fall for the wrong one, maybe because it is widely famous or used by other companies. Only after they implement they realize they don’t get the desired results using that tool or framework. It is always best to lay down your requirements, challenges, and expectations before starting to use an automation tool or framework.

Lack of Skillful Resources

Test automation is supposed to be teamwork of developers, testers, and SDETs, who are responsible to be an interface between the developers and testers. The SDETs can improve the design of the application as per the preference of the end-users need to know the entire SDLC inside out right from product designing, development to testing. It is very important to ensure that all the team members are well aware of the related tools and processes, and best practices. Discussing the tools, trends, and practices related to automation can help them to be updated. When a QA team fails to have these things in mind, then it is obvious that the resources lack the knowledge that they are ought to have. Resources without ample technical and domain skills or expertise may result in the slowdown of results that can affect the overall productivity of the team and eventually the company has to face the consequences.

Varying Requirements or Lack of Inputs

There are different things that make the jobs of the developers and testers difficult. One of them is the constantly changing customer requirements and the other is a lack of understanding about the requirements. In this situation, the developers may keep adding new features to the application and results in a high number of test cases with multiple iterations. The QA team may even have to restart the work from the beginning or dispose of a half-done work. This is where the testers also find it difficult because every time there may be several bugs that they have to fix. Think of the changes that are made just before the product release. Tasks like testing the compatibility of the software across browsers, devices, and operating systems, database migration, etc. are terribly complex. When done with time constraint they may introduce bugs/ errors in the software/application.

Lack of Appropriate Test Environments

QA groups that don’t provide test environments in the cloud are very much prone to challenges when they introduce test automation. It is highly challenging to give varied test environments that are required for test automation to scale up, run the tests, and repeat everything if testing does not take place in the cloud. On-premises, the testing teams usually have a limited number of testing environments which they deploy for fewer tests anytime. Therefore, it is time-consuming. Moving to the cloud will not just scale up the test automation process but also reduce the testing cost of your QA team.

Watch our webinar on “Enhancing QA Strategy to Achieve Agile Quality Engineering” with Katie Kavanaugh, QA Director at Mansfield. The webinar focuses on how we helped a customer overcome the above-mentioned challenges and achieve a great deal of benefits using our unique test automation strategy – Hyper-Testing.

To Know more about how a leading organization overcame their challenges using our promising test automation strategy.

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