Most Common Mistakes We Make In Test Automation

Test automation makes are life easy as for a tester as well as for the entire project team. Test automation helps to identify any regression issues early and also helps to deliver the project early without any testing delays. But question should be asked are we going on the right track or are we using the correct standards. Most fail due to many reasons. Lets look at these failures.

1. Trying test automate everything - This is a management view and they think automation is a magic wand which is a cure for many of the issues in the project and they try to automate every scenario. In practice this is not so. There are many interfaces which we cannot automate which is not possible to capture by any test automation tool. Like command based interfaces.
2. Some only see Selenium and they try to first automate the UI based test cases and try to ignore rest of the test types which we can automate, such as web services testing and unit testing. According to the testing pyramid any organization should embark on automating their unit test cases and web services test cases.
3. Taking into account record and play back test automation - Some management and the automation leads think test automation can be quickly done by recoding testing scenarios and playing them back, Thus this leaves a set of throw away test scripts which make cumbersome and non customizable test scripts which has limited scope.
4. No standards at all - Some organizations just try to automate without any automation and coding standards. They will create hard coded environmental parameters, non understandable variables and code, lengthy code lines and wouldn't consider any reusability at all.
5. No consideration about CI/CD integration - Most organizations just implement test automation without integrating them to the build pipeline. Thus their automation scripts will get executed in their own machine by manually triggering the execution.
6. No source control at all - Some teams do not maintain source control. They just script and copy it to a common repository. This code will get accidentally replaced and even no mechanism of back up.
7. No standard test automation framework - Some teams develop frameworks without considering core components of a test automation framework such as reusability, data driven and reportability, thus leaving no space for scalability of the framework.

These are some failures that comes to my mind when we look at current issues in the test automation practice of an organization.