Welcome to Test Automation

What is Test Automation?

When it comes to test automation there can be so many definitions that you can find if you just googled it. So, this is test automation as I feel about it (Note this definition will never ever give you marks at your QA examination 😉). Again, as I feel test automation is a way of making your life easy, interesting and challenging (FUN AND LESS BORING) at your work place.
In a formal way It’s using the code to make your computer run most of the tests that you have to run manually. If you wonder, why I said, “most of”? The reason is YOU ARE SMARTER !! so simply you can’t achieve 100% test coverage by test automation.

When do we need to Automate tests?

Well to answer that question we have to look at several points. Mainly both Automated testes and Manual tests will change their paths at one point at the road. Until then they have to work together. If we elaborate a bit more and automated test can be defined as an improved subset of the manual tests that you have designed. As mentioned the following steps are common for both automated tests and manual testes
  • Studying the requirements and requirement clarification
    • As a Software tester this falls under the most important duty of yours. Which is making sure you build software/ improvement or the CR fulfilling the client requirements
  • Test Planning
    • This will be a management level task. In brief this will include the strategic plan, resource and time allocation which needed for the testing. When it comes to test automation this stage will decide, do we need automated testes for this task? and how much time should be allocated for test automation etc.
  • Test Case Development
    •  At this level you will be identifying the system users, user scenarios to generate the test cases. And most importantly with this step we will decide what are the test cases that we are going to automate and what are the cases that we are not going to automate
As I mentioned earlier, manual tests and automated tests both will come to this point and then go on their separate ways

Is this the only place that we decide to do test automation?

To write a test automation script you do not have to get a client requirement. There can be so many reasons. For example,
  • To monitor your site
  • To do a smoke test after a deployment
  •  To get an overall performance analysis on your site
  • To avoid repetitive tasks that needs to be done before a manual test, etc.


There are some of the places which I normally use and there can be many more.

Muditha Perera
Software Quality Assurance Engineer

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