High-quality test automation requires Highly Skilled Developers or Software Development Engineer in Test. With high-quality resources, the test automation code written scales and the organization gets benefits in the short and long run. In short term, you get to test your regression or functional tests quickly and in the longer term, the maintenance of automation platform is minimal and adding more scripts to the automation suite takes lesser time. Remember, there is a short-term and long-term benefit only if its done right in the first place.
Generally, a very successful automation suite will have a homegrown automation test framework. When highly skilled developers work on these, they make it robust so that, the framework can evolve over time and helps everyone involved in the product release cycle. Reports for management, logs for troubleshooting, scheduler for efficiency and so on…
New Features vs Test Automation
So, the dilemma is, should the organization spend the high-quality resource’s time to develop test automation or build new features of the product. The business or customers has been asking for new features for a long time and there is a huge backlog of items for development. The situation looks like a chicken and egg problem initially. When you look deeper, both are important. Building a solid automation test for your product is equally important as investing resources for new products. The catch is, you MUST invest in a test automation platform TODAY, otherwise, you RISK increasing your backlog of test automation each day you add more code in the product. When there is a huge backlog for automation, the capital expenditure will become huge when you decide to do it. The compounding effect takes the expenditure higher over time.
In conclusion, if you need long-term benefits of building more features and delivering in shorter cycles, test automation is inevitable. Invest in test automation today and over the time, you can deliver more features with your resources.
While building an automation platform for your testing needs, you might want to develop your own framework on top of open source platforms like Selenium or build your automation platform on top of products like ACRA. If you are able to finalize on an automation test platform like ACRA which is robust, scalable and feature-rich, your high-quality resources can take care of building new features to the product and ACRA takes care of your test automation needs, an end to end.
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