![]() ![]() I’m a firm believer that teams throwing software over a fence to some “automation team” isolated from the rest of the group are bound to fail, or at least see only mild successes with an extraordinary amount of pain. No UI automation project succeeds without involvement from the entire team. You’ve got to balance this decrease in velocity with understanding the wins you’re getting in other areas: time freed from repeating senseless manual regression tests, clearer information on your system’s overall risk to business value, and an increase in confidence around your automation safety net. There’s no way you’ll be successful in the long run if management doesn’t acknowledge there will be, at times, significant impacts to the velocity you’re delivering at. This is a recipe for frustration, missed deliverables, and ever-worsening team morale. You’ll note my overly repetitious repeating of the phrase “on the schedule.” Too often management expects that UI automation effort won’t impact the schedule. Time on the schedule to get your UI automation work done.Significant time (and patience!) on the schedule to adjust your development processes.Time on the schedule to get your team’s skills up to speed on the new tooling.Time on the schedule to get the tooling set up in your environment.Time on the schedule to evaluate what tools to use.UI automation is a software development task, and it takes time. You many also want to ensure they understand the benefits, too… (By “management” I mean your leadership, stakeholders, and customers.) Setting Expectations with Managementīefore you jump off the UI automation cliff, you need to ensure your management chain understands the costs associated with getting this sort of automation in place. Getting a solid set of expectations from management and within the team is critical if you’re going to move forward. Once you’ve gotten a good grasp on why you should be doing UI automation for your project, it’s time to move on to setting yourself up for success. Those manual scripts should be evaluated to understand what critical “Show me the money!” features and use cases they’re guarding. That is a painful path that’s guaranteed to lead to failure. ![]() ![]() Teams should not look to UI automation as a replacement for the 4,942 manual test scripts they have in place. Creating solid UI automation ensures you’re guarded against regressions around business-critical features, like your customers adding items to a shopping cart and checking out-in other words, giving your company money. I often refer to a line my friend Adam Goucher uses when discussing why teams should do UI automation: “Show me the money!” he says, quipping a line from the film Jerry McQuire. Hopefully you’ve got a solid amount of test automation at other levels, but while unit and integration tests are critical to a system’s overall automation approach, by definition they don’t cross all boundaries of a functional slice. UI automation ensures you’ve got tripwires around your most critical business value features in your system. It’s important you understand if it’s worth the cost before jumping in! UI automation is a significant cost in your overall development cycle. We in the software industry don’t ask “Why?” anywhere near as often as we should. Your first question about UI automation is one that’s too often missed: why do UI automation at all? Aren’t unit, integration, and manual/exploratory tests enough? This short series will hopefully give you some ideas on how to look at your specific environment, and how to create a new (or tailor an existing!) automation strategy. UI automation is a difficult domain to work in, and there aren’t any magic “best practices” other than one: use your brain. You’ll notice I’ve mentioned “questions” a lot answers, not so much. Once you’re past the basics, I hope to help you find the right questions on how to evolve your testing over time to continue adding value to your project. The goal of these articles is to help you start asking the right questions to begin building high-value, maintainable automation in place for your projects. Welcome to the first of two articles on being successful with user interface (UI) automation. Republished here with kind permission from the author. Getting Started with UI Test Automation - Simple Talk Skip to content ![]()
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