Have you ever found yourself frustrated with test automation projects? You're not alone. In the world of software testing, it's all about the details. The complexity comes in knowing the details of what the business intends and then designing tests to verify the behavior is as expected. While a human tester or Subject Matter Expert (SME) can mentally navigate through the application while testing and validating, automation tools require a different approach. This is why I sometimes refer to Automation Tools as Subject Matter Idiots or SMI. In this blog post, we will explore one reason it is hard to automate testing and what can be done to overcome it.
Automate Testing with Expert Knowledge - the Challenges and Solutions
Contrary to popular belief, testing software is not just about running a few test cases. One of the main reasons test automation is tricky is because subject matter experts have to translate the requirements and design documents into automation scripts and the underlying code. It is a process of making the software application communicate with the automation tools. This means every single test step has to be defined at a level of instruction that the automation tool can understand and execute. This can be a time-consuming process and can take countless hours of design, testing, and filing in (making up) the details.
As a result, it's tough to automate testing when there are significant gaps between what the software requirements say and what the automation tools can test. When requirements are ambiguous or when they are poorly written, test automation can become even more of a struggle.
In these cases, automation scripts will struggle to successfully validate the expected behavior and may even produce false positives or false negatives as test results. It may also be difficult for the original test designer to verify the automation accurately performs the intended test.
Get Better Results from Test Automation: Tips from Subject Matter Experts
To overcome this challenge, it's important to establish a clear and concise set of test requirements. More importantly, subject matter experts and the automation team need to work closely to ensure that the requirements will translate effectively into automation code. This will reduce the number of gaps between the requirements and what automation can execute.
Another solution is to invest in more sophisticated test automation tools. Many of these tools use models, algorithms, artificial intelligence, or machine learning that can analyze complex interaction patterns and generate automation scripts automatically. This will not only eliminate the need to create hundreds of lines of automation code but also helps to reduce human error.
Unlock your Software Quality Potentials with Advanced Test Automation Tools
Test automation tools and engineers are not idiots, but the challenge of making them understand your requirements and design can be overwhelming. In this blog post, we highlighted one reason that makes test automation difficult and provided a few solutions that could help reduce the gaps between the requirements and automation. Implementing these solutions can make the task of test automation less complicated, help to reduce human error, improve test coverage and speed up the pace of releases while enabling higher software quality. So, it's time to stop calling them idiots and start understanding the "details gap".
