Test Automation Strategy: A Checklist

Kasper Fehrend

Senior Product Evangelist at Leapwork

It's never too late to develop a test automation strategy. You can use this checklist when building yours to make sure that you get the most out of your testing and automation efforts.

Test automation is a cornerstone in DevOps. But it’s not always the easiest to implement. When done well, it can increase the quality of software while keeping costs to a minimum. But without a test automation strategy, the true potential of test automation can often remain undiscovered.  

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Once the decision has been made to roll out test automation, the next issue presents itself: “How are we actually going to do this? What’s the plan?”

Whether it is regression testing, functional testing, or unit testing, having an overview of your test suite before you get started with a testing tool will help your team considerably.

Watch on-demand webinar: How to Build a Successful Test Automation Strategy

Remember, as with anything in IT, there are two ways of doing this. You can either ‘save’ a few days of planning and, instead, spend weeks testing or programming later. Or you can allow yourself to spend a little time developing a test automation strategy that will help you save valuable time during sprints - while improving your QA efforts long term.

 

In this post, you’ll get the answers you need, and learn about:
From manual and automated testing: what now?
How to build a test automation strategy

 

From manual to automated testing: what now?

That might be the first question to ask yourself when you and your team decide to start automating test cases. Or maybe you have been automating for quite some time and already have automated test scripts in place, but have lost track of the processes. It is never too late to create a test automation strategy to get test cases under control.

Related reading: What to consider before starting your test automation journey

Automating test cases is an essential part of a QA test strategy. It speeds up processes in software testing while also limiting errors from the development team. With continuous testing and continuous integration in focus, there is a need for a better, more agile process. Perhaps you are looking into shifting from a waterfall approach to an agile one? Either way, the first step is the decision to start automating.

Another advantage of automating test cases is the reduction of repetitive work. Often people spend hours doing similar tasks over and over, which is very time-consuming and makes a working day dull. This is often where human errors occur in software development. But by automating you can limit them.  

During the adoption phase, it is common to face challenges in the different testing stages. There are several factors to consider in order to successfully implement test automation, and this is what you can find in this test automation strategy checklist.

How to build a test automation strategy

We have created a checklist of areas to focus on when you want to start automating or want to optimize the current automation process.

Related reading: How to measure the business value of test automation

Some of the items you might already be able to check off, while others will require some work - perhaps even help from external consultants. The strategy can be defined in broad terms as well as on narrow projects.

When creating a test automation strategy, you need to focus on:

  1. Scope
  2. Approach
  3. Risk analysis
  4. Environment
  5. Execution
  6. Release
  7. Failure analysis

TA-strategy-steps

Download the full test automation strategy checklist to get a detailed description of each and every step outlined above. Every minute that you spend planning your test automation strategy will contribute to decreasing the number of headaches afterward!

More of a visual learner? We've got you covered. Get immediate access to our on-demand webinar on building a successful test automation strategy.  

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