It’s an old saying that most people have heard in one form or another: “you should learn to walk before you try to run”. The phrase brings to mind toddlers trying to run too quickly and falling. Taking the time to understand and be comfortable with the mechanics of walking before running headlong into an unknown outcome could be more than just a cautionary tale of avoiding the fall.
Our tech-driven world runs a daily marathon to provide customers with the newest features and best hotfixes at ever-faster speeds. Test automation ensures those deliverables have the best quality without sacrificing the quick deliveries we’ve come to expect; however, in a world built for instant gratification, sometimes slowing down is speeding up.
Let’s consider some fundamentals of software testing and test automation to make sure you’re ready to hit the ground running.
Crawl Before You Walk
Before we learn to walk, most of us spend time crawling. Few people know that the amount of time a human spends crawling can have long-term effects on things like balance, running speeds, and joint health. Getting to know your manual testing process has similar long-term effects, setting us up for future success and healthy systems. Manual testing can sure feel like a crawl, but even babies know the process can get us where we need to go.
When it comes to automation you can only make the computer do what you know how to do. That makes it crucial to understand how even the simplest workflows can be laced with nuance and pitfalls for every end user.
Understanding the Task
Each test has a reason for existing, whether it’s functional or fulfills a business need. Understanding the purpose behind a manual test can help prioritize it and ultimately put the test in the to-be-automated stack or the forever manual. By stepping through these test cases manually and completing the task over and over again, we can recognize patterns and find the features that our businesses rely on the most.
Defining Success and Failure
Deciding what’s successful and what’s not sounds fairly easy and is ideally defined during development. For complicated workflows and AI, the line can be much blurrier. Manually exploring the possibilities of each flow will let you experience what your customers do and make decisions about things that work and things that could have a potential impact on your organization’s success.
Spotting the Ambiguous and the Unnecessary
While manually stepping through a process once can give us definitive steps to automate, often it takes manual repetition to understand which steps are unnecessary and which steps are too vague. A good rule of thumb is to have someone else follow your manual process to make sure each step makes sense before committing it to code.
Walk With Confidence
In the same way that we use Salesforce to build and standardize processes, roles, and responsibilities in our organizations, the process of automating tests needs the same kind of care. It can be very tempting to find your feet and want to run, but now is the time to lay the groundwork for success.
Knowing the manual process helps prevent automating unnecessary tasks, saving time and resources. It also keeps institutional knowledge intact and lets you focus on automating the tasks that will save you the most time.
Start Small
Start automating tests for the most critical features that directly impact user experience and business objectives. A login page might not be mission-critical if most of your traffic doesn’t need to log in. Instead, look for items that have the most impact on your daily business and the success of your customers. This might be the feature that has the most customer reports or something that impacts your sales the most (like your checkout process).
Be Modular
Practice object-oriented programming principles and reuse tests – or test pieces – where you can. The manual process you dread doing because you have to do it over and over and over regardless of the goal can be a great place to apply reusable modules. Create separate scripts for user authentication, data entry, or other repeated tasks that can be combined as needed in other scenarios.
Iterate Often
When we start small, it gives us a place to grow. If you find yourself repeating sections of tests for different scenarios, add some variables to make a single test more usable. Still using it often or had to write it over for another scenario? Now might be the time to turn it into that reusable module. Nothing has to start fully optimized. Each iteration is a better version than what you started with. Remember the goal is not creating more problems and tech debt, but should be saving you time and sanity.
Get Ready to Run
Once you have a steady gait, it’s time to start picking up the pace to keep up with those quick sprints. Keeping a clear purpose in mind and finding a rhythm that doesn’t leave you out of breath in a mad dash to stay in the race means your tests can bring more value because they’re directly targeted to your goal.
With the finish line in sight, don’t forget that there might be another marathon right around the corner. Use good practices to keep you trained and ready.
Use Version Control
Keeping test scripts in version control facilitates collaboration and provides a safety net for tracking changes. Remember that test automation is code, even when it’s created with no-code and low-code tools. Tracking changes and having the ability to merge from multiple team members or roll back changes when needed can be the game changer that keeps you moving forward even when you have to take a step back.
Avoid Over Automating
After thorough manual testing, you might realize that certain repetitive tasks don’t warrant automation due to infrequent use. Sure, you check on them frequently to make sure nothing has gone awry, but some studies have shown that up to 80% of features are rarely if ever used. Adding automated tests to these features can often lead to a false sense of security and a lack of scrutiny that can cause major catastrophes down the line. Contrary to popular belief, 100% automation is not the goal.
Encourage Exploration
Balancing automated tests with manual exploratory testing helps catch issues that scripted tests might miss. If you’re running the same set of tests all the time, you’re only catching the same issues. This can lead to problems sneaking by and landing in the hands of users. Use the time automation saves you to explore new test ideas and uncharted areas of your orgs. When you find an area of your project that needs more attention, then start back at the basics to make sure you’re set for success.
How Provar Can Help
Provar works the same way you do. Instead of writing scripts by hand or recording long workflows, Provar lets you add each step of your test one at a time and validate it as you go. Just right-click and “add to test” – it’s that easy.
Moving from manual testing to automation can be a difficult journey, so why pick tools that will work against you? Read our whitepaper to find out more: Product and Vendor Evaluation Guide for Automated Testing.
Reach out to the Provar team to see if we can help you begin your path to test automation.
Summary
Regardless of whether you’re getting ready for a marathon or just making a sandwich, being prepared and taking things one step at a time can carry you to success. It’s not about speed, but endurance and the small changes that help us improve every day.
Software quality is a long marathon. Remember to start at step one and keep putting one foot in front of the other. You’ll be off and running in no time!