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Why automation?

The need for a reliable and maintainable solution can be realised through automation and a fault finding tool that provides early detection and instant feedback ensures this realisation. Not only does automation provide a safety net and ensures repeated continuity but it can also enforce test driven development.

Whether automation is focused on unit testing, functional testing, API testing, integration testing or regression testing there is a huge benefit from it regardless. Manual testing alone is error prone and can be slow. Having automation allows resources to be available to focus on new feature testing, exploratory testing and for developers to push for more features because the testing capacity is shared by an automation tool and can therefore commit to increased testing scope. What the team needs to always stay conscious of in a testing automation framework is that, the focus of automation is the tests themselves and not a perfect framework.

When to run automation?

Testing in Agile starts when the sprint starts and so should automation. The skill required for an automation tester is that of a tester-developer. Once user stories have been committed to by the development team, the developers can start coding the solution and the testers can start to prepare test cases for the user stories.  These tests cases should consider if the test case is required to be automated.  Often repetitive functions are considered to be ideal for automation, though not every requirement or user story should be automated.

Recommended Further Reading

The following materials may assist you in order to get the most out of this course:

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