Michael Burnside Blog: Software Quality Assurance, Quality Engineering, and Web and Mobile Test Automation Expert 22 May 2013 STRATEGY FOR SUCCESSFUL COMPLETION OF TEST AUTOMATION DEBT USING AGILE PROCESS

Strategy for successful completion of Test Automation Debt using Agile process Table of Contents: 1.Definition of Test Automation Debt 2.Decision of automation debt strategy 3.How to build the teams 4.What the teams should focus on

Strategy for successful completion of Test Automation Debt using Agile process What is the correct test automation debt elimination strategy for my organization? Answer: it depends on a few factors: 1) Is the effort of automating test cases only going to be done on current test cases and not new ones identified during Agile sprints? 2) Will the effort focus on only new test cases identified during Agile sprints? 3) Will it be a combination of 1 and 2? This is almost entirely 100% of what will be decided to do.

Strategy for successful completion of Test Automation Debt using Agile process So, assuming that your organization will be automating some previously existing test cases and new ones identified during Agile sprints, a good strategy is to: 1.First make sure any test automation is using a strong testing framework with adequate reporting capabilities and can be run on a Continuous Integration server 2.Create a team to focus on previously identified test cases 3.Create a team to focus on current Agile stories

Strategy for successful completion of Test Automation Debt using Agile process Other recommendations: 1.Don’t put too much emphasis on making sure the 2 teams (the one automating previous test cases and the one focusing on automating current sprint stories) have constant communication between the teams. 2.Allow them to focus on the task at hand, and allow each member to focus and become an expert on one particular area of the app and become fast and efficient at it. 3.Don’t worry about test automation test case duplication – probably will not happen a lot. 4.The main focus is to allow each team to focus on their product area and automate as fast as possible while still maintaining high quality of test code.

Strategy for successful completion of Test Automation Debt using Agile process Other recommendations (continued): 1.Create wiki page support with instructions on how to run the tests for each group of tests (assuming using TestNG). 2.Think of the manual QA team as a ‘customer’ to the test automation team as ultimately, the tests are mainly to benefit the manual QA team extend code coverage testing. 3.Have manual QA team constantly verify what is being tested and acceptance criteria is being met for all test cases. 4.For the team that is automating the previously created test case backlog, DO NOT put a time limit or set deadlines for work to be finished – allow the team to work at a pace that allows for the creation high quality and very supportable test code.

Strategy for successful completion of Test Automation Debt using Agile process Thanks! I sincerely hope this presentation was useful to you and that your company or organization implement the information and process in this presentation to the fullest extent. If you have any feedback, please feel free to get in touch with me (via Twitter) I would love to hear very constructive comments on how to improve this presentation and make it more effective.