In our second of four installments, Utopia Founder & CTO Lee discusses how implementing automation with resources that lack automation or testing experience can lead to negative results.
Thank you for joining today’s episode of QA Bytes. Today we have another installment discussing common test automation issues. And today’s topic is inappropriate staffing.
A common cause of failure for automation implementations is unrealistic expectations. Typically a lot of those expectations revolve around resources required to implement and maintain automation. These expectations often result in one of the following situations:
- Use an existing test analyst with little or no automation experience.
- Using developers with little or no automation or testing experience.
- Or relying on test automation engineers for all your automated testing tasks.
This isn’t saying that automation makes your existing test analysts useless, in fact, if done right, you should be able to free up your existing test analysts to focus on higher value tasks.
We like to implement frameworks that separate the duties of test analysts and dedicated automation engineers. It allows test analysts to focus on their strengths, creating and maintaining test cases, while allowing automation engineers to build and maintain the test code that consume and execute those test cases.
This approach also provide much more staffing flexibility. If you’re eventually going to extend automation to multiple applications, projects or even business units, this model allows a relatively small group of dedicated automation engineers to support a much larger set of testing efforts.
It also gives you flexibility of outsourcing the automation effort if an internal automation team doesn’t align with your goals.
Thank you for joining today’s episode of QA Bytes. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me via email or social media. For Utopia Solutions, I’m Lee Barnes.
