Agile Test Automation

This article shares thoughts, experiences, and some of the critical lessons learned while implementing software test automation on a recent Agile project. Although it took them quite some time to reach their current status, it’s been well worth the investment and the efforts are paying off in big way. The team is now able to build, integrate, test and deploy their application software with production-like quality in a production-like environment every single day.

Some of the key points of this article are:
* automated tests are best developed incrementally
* maintain a test automation backlog for your project that contains all needed automation tasks and identified improvements
* software testing tools and frameworks are just a mean to achieve test automation are not the real goal of your testing efforts
* create meaningful tests and don’t try to automate everything
* get software tests out of your local machine
* keep all the tests in your test suite running successfully

The author reminds us that that automating software tests allows computers to do what they do best: rapid execution of regression test suites to verify software functionality over and over again. This allows the people on the team to focus more on developing and testing the system using theirs cognitive skills in an exploratory fashion.