In all my experience testing business applications, testing GUI responsiveness and workflows (especially those with much more than a few screens/steps) are strong time-consuming for any QA Automation specialist.
At the same time, in your business:
- Using the POM you are getting the benefits of avoiding re-coding test scripts, making them more readable, maintainable, and reusable.
- However, all these advantages won’t give your tests a “business sense”. So, you need something else to go from “spare automated tests” of features to meaningful “business transactions tests”.
That being said, if you are a Product Owner, Scrum Master or a Stakeholder who feels that QA Automation efforts of your team should be more business-like, this post will make sense to you.
Precision at GUI test Automation.
GUIs are often expected to change because of the nature of agile software development and the increasing screen resolutions where you need your application available.
During the testing, difficulties with GUIs come up when Selenium Webdriver cannot locate the Web elements on the page because they are not where expected to be. So “Breadcrumbs” (IDs) are needed to find the way.
“Breadcrumbs” on the way will help QA Automation specialists in making simpler and efficient test scripts. In practice, Development team members agree to identify (automated or manually) with an ID every element of every web page.
Once a web element is identified within a page, Selenium will find it no matter the position, resolution or way of looking (landscape, portrait, etc.) and the test that uses these IDs will work on any device.
This approach gives your team savings around 50-60% of extra maintenance tasks over test scripts to manage responsive GUIs.
Workflows
The goal is to do tests with business sense, and a shared repository between Development-QA is the ideal space to make it happen.
It’s a powerful approach to test business processes instead of test tiny business rules. As an example in B2B, is better to test a complete Quote-to-order process instead of standard quote, proforma, payment, invoice and order fulfillment as separate processes.
- Atomicity is the key, this requires that each sequence be “all or nothing”: if one part of the transaction fails, then the entire transaction fails.
To implement the approach, the work is to organize and run an atomic sequence of test scripts using tools like Nightwatch JS as a sequencer, Node.js to write the test cases and Selenium to execute Browser Automation tasks.
- To work better/faster my recommendation is to have a shared GIT Development-QA to avoid reworks of integration, and to use fewer DevOps personnel for deployments.
“We at Teravision use Nightwatch / Node.js / Selenium standalone server to define and run automated sequences of reusable tests that work with the Atomicity of a transaction. This helps a lot our customers to take go/stop decisions for going live.”
Think wide, think business transactions.
Business-focused QA Automation is about thinking wide enough to view your GUIs and Workflows test scripts as a sequence that defines a business-driven test transaction. When doing this, each test transaction will lead to a go/no-go result business decision (in addition, this approach paves the way to continuous integration and delivery).
With Business-focused QA Automation, your team is covering almost all regression, smoke and data-driven tests saving more than half the time spent not doing it or doing it wrong.
Are you working with your team to improve QA Automation?
Contact us. We can work together and speed-up the way to Business-focused QA Automation transactions.
