Test Automation Challenges

The initial phase of setting up test automation is expensive. It involves careful analysis, design, and development of a framework. Additionally, there are licensing, development and operational costs. There are certain costs attached in acquiring the right resources with the necessary skills to facilitate test automation. It is a challenge to get the top management to see the long term benefits of test automation vis-à-vis the initial setup cost. They should be convinced of the importance of test automation in terms of time-to-market, test Coverage, accuracy, improved regression, performance, functionality, etc.

QA team should be well equipped with the necessary technical skills to design and maintain test framework with the relevant test scripts and should be proficient enough to resolve issues if any.  This implies that, in addition to the current testing related skill set, they should be well versed in programming languages and have a good know-how of the testing tool being used. It is a time-intensive exercise to acquire the right skill set or train the existing team. This sometimes leads to opting for manual testing over automation to save resources.

In their zeal to automate the tests, the testing teams end up taking short cuts by building and executing the tests without proper planning. As a result, some tests may fail leading to distrust for test automation. Ideally, the tests should be carefully planned, written and stabilized before rolling out for the final automation process.

Maintaining a repository of the automated test case is a huge task, especially for large scale projects. Every time there is a change in functionality, the related test cases need to be updated in order to accommodate those changes. Any change in the test environment or third party tools also calls for appropriate changes in test cases to reflect any environmental or configuration impact. Identifying the affected test cases, modifying and verifying them again is a complex and error-prone process.

Test data management is a big challenge when it comes to automated testing. Test script execution expects test data to be in a certain state. There could be instances when there are multiple scripts, representing different test scenarios, accessing the same data at the same time. Data’s atomicity might be affected and there could be issues due to modification of the data by any of the scripts, which may lead to test failure of another script. Thus, it is important to have appropriate test data strategies in place to prevent such issues.