Owen Savage
To provide a great end-user experience, websites and web applications must be compatible with multiple browsers, browser versions, operating systems, and devices, including mobile devices. With all the possible combinations, there are a large number of usage scenarios to be tested. That means you’re going to need a good web test automation strategy.
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While any process that involves a website or web application can be subject to web test automation, a web test automation strategy is a way of approaching automating web-based tests.
This short article will explain the key parts of such a strategy and what you need to consider when making one. It will put particular emphasis on what kind of approach you should take to web test automation.
Read more: The Basics of Web App Test Automation
Scope
First of all, you’re going to need to decide the scope of your web based tests. This involves deciding the scale of your testing and what web tests to automate or do manually.
Approach
Next you have to clarify what your central approach to web testing will be. You’ll need to identify which web-based technologies you need to automate and form a well-defined process for the features that do need to be performed manually.
It might also be the case that you’re automating other things as well as testing, so your approach will need to bear this in mind, as well as who is responsible for what.
For Web Applications, one of the testing tools you can use for this process is Selenium. However, as shown in the below graphic, using Selenium requires the ability to code.
Creating and maintaining test scripts in Selenium requires developer resources. This considered, what options are available to business users and testers who can’t code?
Leapwork’s visual, no-code approach to test automation uses building blocks, and you can automate your web tests using a smart recorder.
With this kind of approach, you can sit back and watch your test cases become flows, turn common steps into reusable subflows and spend less time on maintenance.
Risk analysis
Before you automate web testing, you’ll need to know the consequences of what could happen if that testing failed.
Read more: How to Reduce Risk with Codeless Test Automation
That means you need to think of what could go wrong, look at potential costs and find ways to mitigate the risk. This also includes judging the probability and severity of risk.
Test environment
Any kind of test automation strategy is going to require you to create a suitable environment for your testing data.
This involves asking questions like where are you going to store test data? Should the test cases clean up data on their own after use? And can production data be masked in order to ensure privacy?
Execution Plan
An execution plan should outline the day-to-day tasks and procedures related to your automated web testing.
In the web system that is being automated, a procedure has to be created to make test cases resistant to chances. This depends on the web app or browser in question.
Release control
Another part of your strategy will involve establishing a system around when to make releases. This is of course dependent on your testing system and its results.
Whether you release or not will depend on the results of those tests, so you need to have a good way of interpreting those results.
Failure analysis
That means you’ll need to analyze failing tests and take suitable action when they fail. Reacting to test failure often takes longer than people anticipate, so building failure analysis into your web test automation strategy is vital.
Review and feedback
Finally, when you’re done making your strategy for web test automation using the previous steps, you need your team members to review it and give feedback.
We’ve made a whole checklist on test automation strategy which you can download below!
