5 Best Practices for Writing Automated Tests

In my experience, a majority of QAs I’ve worked with joined the field from non-technical backgrounds and most have been self-taught in their discipline.

This has taught me that we all tend to do things differently and along the way, we figure out what works best for us.

I have also seen in my career, automation test suites crumble and become ineffectual due to a lack of best practices being followed.

But what are best practices for test automation?

What is considered best practice varies amongst us all, but following these practices have allowed me to build automation suites with teams that are easy to read, simple to troubleshoot, and provide high-value to my organization.

1. 1 Test, 1 Validation

• Tests should be simple. They should have 1 single goal.

—Users interacting with your app have 1 single goal they want to achieve before moving on to any secondary goal.

—End to End tests should not only behave like a user; they should mimic a user’s intent.

• Having multiple verifications in your test can seem like a ‘two birds one stone’ situation, but it actually results in a nightmare when it fails.