Building an Effective Automated QA Testing Team

In order to compete in the IT industry, any big fish or a small IT Service provider needs Automated QA Testing expertize.

Why Automation

Automation as a tool makes a productive team more effective than that same set of people would be without it. It is a capability that, when added to and employed by a skilled force, increases the potential of that unit manifold, thereby enhancing the probability of successful project submission.

One important question to answer is, how can we implement it in the structure without hampering the roots of manual testing?

Only a stable testing team can take up the challenge of introducing automation in the structure. It’s critical to choose people who understand the Software Development Life-Cycle (SDLC) well.

• How can we decide the budget for this division?
• Which tool can we introduce and how?
• How can we analyze the capability of the available resources?
• How can we decide upon new hiring requirements?
• How can we avoid duplication of resources for a particular tool?

Investing in building an automated software testing team is a thought-provoking task. The authorities should be very clear about their input susceptibilities as well as expectations. A careful documentation of both is needed before laying the first brick.

Automated QA testing could revolutionize the process by reducing test cycles, enhancing product stability as well as slashing the time and effort of manual testing. All this can only be achieved with a concrete strategy of employing the correct set of people having a vision to change the classic approach with the help of the right tools.

As the entire process is high cost incurring, it is always good to take a safe approach by implementing tools to a pilot project, followed by incremental roll-out to the rest of the organization. Pilot projects always help in reducing risks and fallacies.

After rolling out few successful projects, it is important to decide whether the company is ready to build their own QA automation tools or adopt automation tools available in the market. This is a critical financial decision as using a third party tool and buying licenses could be a huge investment. One economical way to proceed is to provide training to a set of people and utilize them in constructing their own tools and frameworks. This helps in setting and publishing expertise in the market to gain more business.

The above steps may sound easily achievable; however there are companies that rolled out automation solutions but eventually had to step back to manual testing.

To avoid this situation, few precautions are outlined below:

• Start automation when you are confident with your technical staffing ( Hire few if you have doubts)
• Choose the right project and keep the client clear about the deliverables. Avoid false framing of outputs.
• Decide upon the correct strategy in the beginning and make global repositories to avoid last minute resource crunches.
• Constantly update scripts to reduce long term maintenance cost.

If the listed factors are covered then there is nothing that can hold you back.

Our quest for building an Automated QA Testing Team will never end as the percentage of automated task will always increase. Having said that, automation QA Testing solutions are set to produce competent returns way into the future.