Why should you manage automation testing results?
To ensure effective automation testing, you need to devise a test management strategy and choose appropriate technologies and test coverage for your project. This will provide you with transparency into autotest results, efficient analysis and management of those results, and a strategy for dealing with fragile tests, which are the test that work most of the time.
One of the most common problems when implementing test automation is a lack of attention to the management of autotest results. Managing the results of automation tests is an integral part of building an efficient testing strategy. It can help you significantly shorten the repetitive manual testing process and optimize your QA expenses in the long run.
The worst-case scenario is when you run tests locally in the automated quality assurance (AQA) environment and they are not integrated into the continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline. In this case, you have no control over either the regular running of autotests or their results. As time passes, or after changing your AQA environment, autotests may never be run again and their previous results may get lost. Consequently, the money and other resources dedicated to writing and running these tests may prove to have been spent in vain.
In more mature processes, QA engineers and developers integrate autotests into the CI/CD pipeline. QA specialists regularly run tests in test environments, and results are compiled in one report. Usually, the automation testing team works independently from the manual testing team. Therefore, manual tests and their results are monitored separately from autotests. There are some negative consequences to this:
- You need to put effort into managing test results in more than one place
- There’s a risk of not responding to failed autotests in time
Sometimes, manual and automated QA specialists have blurred responsibilities for monitoring the results of autotests, which might lead to test results not being processed or even being lost. Also, the unclear responsibilities of manual and automated QA specialists complicate the process of calculating autotest coverage, which is one of the most important metrics for managing test automation.
