In today’s time, although test automation provides faster time-to-market and increased coverage, there are certain cases where it fails to deliver the expected results and adds zero value to the business. In these cases, enterprises need to think beyond traditional test automation approaches and try to embed business objectives to it to achieve the desired effectiveness and efficiency in the test automation efforts.
This may sound unusual, but yes, identifying and deriving business objectives before creating a test automation program gives an upper hand, in that the entire test automation project is implemented and measured against business goals along with a defined testing goal which is conducive to achieve effectiveness, quality and performance of software in line with business objectives.
There are no techniques or set of thumb rules to make your test automation business-driven. It just requires you to consider business goals while testing rather than just verifying the functional and performance aspects of a given software. In other words, to drive business value in your test automation practices, you only need to keep in mind certain key concepts and steps.
1. Understand Business Requirements: Understand and collate the business requirements and goals of all the stakeholders. This may include short term as well as long term business requirements.
2. Involve Business Analysts: Involve QA and business analysts from the project start up to define business rules as well as test scenarios and generate automated scripts which are then run in the application.
3. Create Standardized Metrics: Create standardized business metrics based on the requirements and inputs gathered from the persons involved to set up a basic guideline for generating scripts.
4. Communicate and Collect: Communicate the defined goals and metrics to the people involved in the test automation project. Further, collect feedback to alter the same by not making the metrics too rigid.
5. Map Business Focus: Map the application with the metrics created and verify whether the application supports them to easily perform the desired automation process.
6. Finalize & Establish: Finalize the objectives mentioned in the metrics with the QA team and establish a baseline to create test automation scripts.
7. Test with Defined Business Perspective: Test the software with business-driven test scripts, ensuring optimal test coverage and minimal risk.
8. Measure Results: Measure and quantify the results of the test program to check whether the expected business value is derived and also confirm that there are no deviations from the established goals.
QA firms and software companies can always rely on the above guidelines to ensure they drive enormous business value from their test automation program. While identification and creation of business goals is no brainer, the application that you chose should support the metrics and should be flexible enough to update test cases as per changing business requirement without much effort. It is also important to select a robust and flexible testing tools that meet the expectations and changing requirements without complicated testing structures.
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