Introduction
Retail industries engage their customers through online, mobile, and point-of-sale systems. Therefore, it is very important that these companies remain relevant to modern market trends. Customer loyalty today is very fragile and is easily lost from services and responses are not up to user expectations. Ongoing competition to implement new features, offerings, and customer experiences ahead of competitors often leads to skipping the planning phase of testing. A well-planned strategy for test automation helps to maintain this pace and overcome the risk of inconsistent scenarios.
Test Automation Strategy
Feasibility analysis:
Technical
- Carrying out a Proof of Concept on the application.
- Understand the technical architecture of the application, plugins based on the technical architecture, communication protocols, and the applicability of automation tools and tool adapters.
- Quantitative evaluation and comparative analysis of automation tools based on criteria with specific weightings.
- High level of understanding of the application to modularize them.
- A correct selection of the scenarios to be tested.
Financial
- Consider ROI to assess the financial viability of the automation initiative.
- Include long-term investments to ensure a robust and reusable automation suite.
- Get the right automation tool with the necessary plugins to overcome technical hurdles.
- Whenever possible, simulate actions and calls to ensure end-to-end test coverage.
Process and Methodology
- keyword-based framework: Modularization helps maintain test scripts. Common functions can be programmed as reusable functions/keywords that can be called by various scripts for different test scenarios.
- Data parameterization: A robust automation script should be data-driven and designed so that test data can be supplied and manipulated at runtime.
- early automation: An automation framework that enables early automation or is based on early automation principles improves ROI. It helps define business processes and validation rules even before the application is functionally stable. When the application is ready, test scripts can be generated from the predefined templates.
- Automation Scope: It is very important to identify the correct scenarios for automation testing. Typical scenarios that need automation are sales, returns, exchanges, discounts, promotions, price change, and price search.
- test management: Interaction of the automation suite with test management tools helps take advantage of user interface features that make it easy to understand and report test execution status.
Environment and Infrastructure:
- Make sure that the same technology, hardware, and platform available in the production environment are also available for the test environment.
- Maintain a database at regular checkpoints.
- Maintain separate databases for manual and automated tests.
- Make sure the correct scripts are running in the correct environment and the correct release version of the application.
Tools and Accelerators
- Automation tools must be compatible with the technology platform on which the system runs.
- Operating system manufacturers have been known to supply customized versions of operating systems to support a particular system. When selecting an automated tool, make sure that it is compatible with the specific operating system.
- Automation tools sometimes do not recognize objects used with touch screen UI features. Such a touch screen user interface should be automated by tools that can simulate the object methodology.
- Technology accelerators can be used to simulate peripheral devices. These can help automation tools to recognize non-standard user interface objects.
Conclution
Test automation comprises a comprehensive strategy by following a structured process and selecting the appropriate tools and accelerators. There is no common strategy for any system, each differs in its own aspect. Therefore, test automation strategies need to be shaped accordingly.