As a Consultant, I have worked with organizations helping with Agile transformations. Although these organizations may vary in size and industry, they often have common questions when addressing Quality Assurance (QA) test automation. Why is automation important, what should we automate, how should we automate, what percentage should we automate?

All these questions are valid and there are no perfect answers. However, this blog can provide some key guidance when implementing QA test automation in your Agile organization.

Why QA Test Automation Is Key for Agile Success?

Agile teams strive to continuously meet evolving customer needs while maintaining speed, quicker time to market, adaptability and product quality.

The role of QA in Agile is critical to ensuring that high-quality products are delivered quickly and consistently within this fast-paced environment. QA's responsibilities are not just to find bugs.

Their role extends beyond traditional testing through the Agile development cycle by collaborating to provide early defect detection and ultimately validating that the product meets customer needs and expectations.

Ensuring cost and time efficient iterative quality at scale will be challenging to achieve utilizing just manual testing. QA test automation therefore becomes an integral part in contributing to meeting Time to Market (TTM) and customer quality for an Agile organization.

Optimizing Test Automation: Why Automate?

Organizations that lack automation can struggle to achieve the core values of Agile development such as collaboration, continuous delivery and speed. Without adequate automation, testing becomes a manual, time-consuming process that can lead to delays and problems.

QA test automation can benefit Agile organization in various ways.

  • Automation is a key component that helps maintain high-quality software delivery while keeping up with fast-paced development cycles.
  • Automation can help the QA team cost effectively test across more use case scenarios, environments and platforms increasing the span of test coverage.
  • Bugs can be detected as soon as code is complete. Early detection helps avoid costly defects and reduces the effort needed for bug fixing. Refer to 1-10-100 rule in quality software development.
  • In an Agile environment speed is key. Automation accelerates the feedback loop for development and test cycles.
  • Automation supports continuous integration and delivery ensuring that critical paths, features, and functionality are fully tested without slowing down the release pipeline, enabling more frequent and quicker deployments.
  • Automated regression tests ensure the old code base remains stable as new features are deployed.
  • Consistency and reliability with automation is increased with reduced risk of human error.
  • Cost efficiency over time is realized as automating helps reduce long term costs by minimizing repetitive manual testing.
  • The size of the application grows over time with required new features, functionality and enhancements. Therefore, the amount of testing grows and automation contributes to scaling test efforts.

Determining What and How Much to Automate in Testing

There is no perfect path for balancing manual and automated QA tests in Agile organizations. A goal is often to aim high for automation such as automating ~70-90% of test cases.

The main principle in Agile is to automate enough to sustain fast, reliable feedback while balancing manual testing for edge cases, exploratory testing, and usability testing.

Determining the exact percentage of QA test automation can vary based on several factors such as project complexity, maturity, team capacity, skills, priorities and risks.

Test areas to consider for automation include unit, integration, regression, API and User Interface (UI) testing. 

  • Automating unit tests help reduce the risk of introducing bugs, support efficient refactoring and ensure code reliability. 
  • Automated integration tests ensure all the components work together.
  • In order to catch bugs introduced by new changes, regression tests can be automated. 
  • API testing when automated can streamline back-end and system interactions.
  • Automated UI tests can help ensure that the user interface functions correctly across various user experiences. 

Additionally, ensure to automate the critical paths of the most important functionality as well. Automation should focus on high-priority, high-risk, high traffic or frequently executed test cases.

Prioritizing functional areas that have historically shown higher defect rates is also beneficial. As your application and team scale, plan to revisit your automation coverage. Continuous improvement and reviewing automated test coverage will help your organization align better with evolving needs.

Encourage development practices that incorporate testing early in the software development process. This approach helps ensures that more automated tests are created alongside new features, reducing defects early on.

It is helpful to maintain a balance that leverages the strengths of both automated and manual testing. Certain aspects like exploratory testing, usability testing, and tests for newly developed features can be more suited for manual testing and require human insight.

Key Considerations for Test Automation?

When implementing QA automation, keep these key factors in mind:

  • Define a strategy and determine what to automate first based on business goals and testing priorities.
  • Identify the tools required and the selection criteria.
  • Build an Automation framework based on important areas such as maintainability, reusability and scalability.
  • Include test automation as part of sprint planning and the Definition of Done (DoD).
  • Plan to integrate automated testing in your Continuous Integration/ Continuous Development (CI/CD) pipeline.

In Summary

In an Agile organization without QA test automation, teams are challenged with inefficiencies, reduced quality and increased costs. Automation is essential for maintaining speed, quality, reliability and scalability. QA test automation is important in supporting the principles of Agile including continuous improvement, fast feedback loops, and frequent releases.

If you need help or guidance with your QA test automation strategy, please contact AKF.