Software quality assurance and testing are a crucial part of every application development lifecycle. Most enterprises and test engineers today prefer automation testing and bug management tools thanks to the entire host of advantages offered by it. There’s no denying that the straightforward learning curve with minimal time and energy in testing are the good things that testers and enterprises can leverage from test automation, however, it sometimes becomes difficult to perform projects thanks to the difficulty in managing test automation resources and test cases accurately.
So the way to manage your test automation projects and achieve the specified productivity from your test automation project?
The answer lies in following some standard practices. Here are the 5 ways of managing your test automation projects effectively and make the foremost out of your test automation efforts.
1. Thoroughly Plan Your Test Cases & Test Suites
The primary aspect before starting test automation is to plan your test cases and test suites. Starting test automation without appropriate planning of test cases may result in uncertainty and unexpected results thanks to the non-availability of correct steps and test scenarios. The thorough planning of test suites and test cases and tests is equally as important for managing the test assets for future use. If the test plans are informed to the developers, it also helps in prioritizing the event and testing efforts within the right direction, eliminating the unnecessary and lesser important processes.
2. Centralize Your Test Assets
To fully leverage and enable effective management of your automated test projects, it’s also important that you simply centralize all of your test assets through a standard repository for quicker and smoother access. Centralization of test assets will help obviate the overheads of the distributed resources, plus it can assist you to share resources with development teams.
3. Differentiate Test Objects
For successful test automation projects, it is vital to separate good test objects from bad ones. This may assist you to run tests faster, improve the testing process, reduce costs and time for test designing. On the other hand, it’ll also assist you to eliminate the repetitive test execution in order that you’ll spend longer on test design, drive repeatability of regression tests and achieve better test coverage permanently.
4. Validate & Remove Outdated Test Cases
With time, applications undergo changes so as to accommodate future requirements, which suggests you would like to validate and alter test cases to suit these requirements. Conducting validity checks after every software update or release will also help you to keep your tests compatible with new changes introduced within the software application.
Furthermore, and to add to this, it is also crucial to eliminate any test cases that are not compatible with the software any longer. This may reduce the value of managing outdated and unnecessary test suites and simplify future test executions.
5. Separate Test Architecture
Lastly, separate your test architecture and libraries from your test automation or bug management tool. This may assist you to manage and document test cases clearly and simply with minimum effort. Separating test architecture from the tool also will ensure their reusability across different projects, tools, and environments.
As a Senior Marketing Consultant at Kualitatem, Ray Parker loves to write tech-related news, articles, specifically quality assurance and information security. I have had years of experience writing in different tech niches and among some include, Dzone, SAP, Dataflop and Readwrite etc. Apart from his techie appearance, he enjoys soccer, reading mysteries, and spending long hours working over at the New York office.