It’s important to give any automation tool you’re interested in a thorough evaluation. Otherwise, you risk the project dragging out unnecessarily, or worse still, being canceled altogether.
The post is a quick guide about how to evaluate and implement automation tools. So let’s get started with test automation today!
Here are 2 simple steps to evaluate a test automation tool:
1. Evaluation:
The first step in determining the best Test Automation tool for your company is to define what criteria you should evaluate it by. Here are some criteria we use to evaluate a test automation tool:
Tech Compatibility: Is the tool compatible with our systems and applications?
Process Compatibility: How simple is it to create automation flows with this tool?
Organizational Compatibility: Is the tool vendor capable of providing the relevant documentation?
Technology Compatibility: Define the technology you want to automate, and then check to see if the automation tool you’re using supports it. Most of the time, you may categorize it into one of the following categories:
- Mobile web application or web-based technologies
- Application that runs on your computer
- SAP-based software
- Citrix or another type of virtual desktop technology
Process compatibility: Begin by sketching out two or three of the processes you want to automate. We advocate identifying some typical operations that are frequently performed and could be automated to save time and money. Then use these examples to assess a tool’s usability; how easy is it to create these flows as automation cases with the product in question?
Different tools have different features and each one has its pros and cons.
Some software is more robust for handling enterprise-level testing and retesting of large-scale web apps, while some are better for evaluating the performance of web pages.
Organizational compatibility
To ensure that an automation solution is a good fit for your company, make sure that the required documentation and resources are distributed to the appropriate stakeholders: IT, Operations, DevOps, Business owners, and security management
2. Implementation:
After you’ve weighed your options and decided on a tool to use, it’s time to spread it out across your organization. Training and deployment are the two key tasks in the implementation process.
Training: The automation technology vendor should, ideally, provide both a training programme and readily accessible training materials to enable advanced and rapid internal adoption of the tool. The goal of a training programme should be for participants to be able to fully automate their business domain.
Deployment: The goal of this step is to guarantee that the automation tool’s components are properly deployed in a “best fit” deployment from the start, and that planned executions of automation flows perform as expected.
The following deliverables are included in the deployment phase:
- Method of installation and deployment evaluation and definition
- Creating the necessary servers and environments
- Installation and configuration that is “ready to launch”
- Management and maintenance instructions for the deployed platform
It is important to note that you’re not just looking for a tool with these features, but also checking if they’re actually useful to you. For example, if the tool only comes with an automated test recorder but no way to compare recordings on different devices, then it might not be worth your time or money. So choose the best automation tool that fits your needs.
