4 Easy Steps How to Start Test Automation

After leading a course for the last year every new group asks the same question again and again: How to start the automation? And it’s not about just knowing the tools.

That’s a bit tricky question since there can be several points to start with. And I hope to cover all of them later.

Let’s assume you have some infrastructural layers already built and ready to use. One day a developer enters your room:
“Hey, we’ve just finished first version of our new ultra cool project and we have huge plans for the future. We’d like to setup some automation for it. Can you help us?”
“Yeah. Why not? Give me a link”

In a couple of minutes you are already reading an email with short description and you’re opening a link. From now I usually suggest to follow these four simple steps:

Research the project
Pretty easy step. Just walk around the project. Maybe draw some sort of a roadmap of the project to get a generic overview what’s going on there
Later this step will help you with planning your business objects, logical parts, page objects and shared components and other generic stuff

Plan your objects
You have a pretty good overview and understanding of the project and now you can structure your drivers for the project.
Even more, you can just create them. High level classes, without specific methods. Just templates
Later you will add all required methods and logic for the tests

Write test cases
Depending on the group/project structure there are might be a separate groups of testers and automators. In any case there will be a nice person who would write all required test cases with steps, checks, test data and other relevant information
That’s the point where cooperation between groups really matters. And the whole automation will be relied on the quality of written test cases.

Develop
The last step is just a simple development phase. You take prepared test cases and start implementing them in the code. Here you will fill all pre-created classes with methods which will reflect the work with pages/screens.

At the end you will get a pretty well structured and good written automation project.

When you’re starting to develop new project don’t just start writing some tests, make a research and planning. This will save you a lot of time in future