Decide What Test Cases to Automate

It is impossible to automate all test scenarios or test cases in given application testing scope, so it is important to determine what test cases should be automated in order to reduce manual testing effort, cost and improve application quality.

 

The benefit of automated testing is related to how many times a given test can be repeated. Test scenarios that are only executed a few times are better left for manual testing. Good test cases for automation are ones that are run frequently and require large amounts of data to perform the same action.

 

We can get the most benefit out of our automated testing efforts by automating:

 

• Repetitive tests that run for multiple builds.
• Tests that require multiple data sets. E.g. All Data Driven Test scenarios
• Tests that run on several different hardware or software platforms and configurations. E.g. Browser compatibility
• Frequently used functionality that introduces high risk conditions.
• Tests that is impossible to perform manually. 
• Tests that tend to cause human error. 
• Tests that take a lot of effort and time when manual testing.

Success in test automation requires careful planning and design robust framework for given test scope. Therefore, automation team needs to create an automation plan for given project by analyzing application scope and determining all functional test areas that need to be automated with project qa team members.

First, we should define our project testing goal for automated testing and determine which types of tests to automate. Currently we are employing nuemorous types of testing in navantis test practice , and each has its place in the our organization process.

For instance,

 Unit Testing : Is use to test a small part of the intended application.
 Load Testing : Is performe when we need to know how a web service responds under a heavy workload.
 GUI Testing: Is use to test a certain piece of the application’s UI

Hope the above points will help you make a decision whether to use test automation on future Navantis projects. Whether you are beginning to think of exploring test automation or already have an automation suite in place and are considering expansion, it always helps to continue to evaluate how our test automation will help accomplish our testing goals. By choosing carefully those things that we will automate, and building with maintainability in mind, definitly we will obtain the most out of our test automation effort in our future projects.