Regardless of the Software Delivery Lifecycle you follow, the chances are you have a desire to shorten your test cycles, increase your business risk coverage, and stick to an approved budget. These are competing objectives and the typical solution is to turn to test automation. So why is it that analyst reports such as The World Quality Report 2018 suggest that the level of test automation is still remarkably low?

At P2 Consulting we think that it comes down to three key challenges: Talent, Tools & Testability

Starting with Talent, if we consider the automation pyramid, which was first proposed by Mike Cohn in 2009, logically most test automation should be focused at the Unit Test level and the Service-Level / API as this is quicker to run and cheaper to maintain.

The Automation Pyramid proposed by Mike Cohn in 2009

However, this requires developers to drive a lot of the automation. In my experience of working in large enterprises the amount of unit testing is inconsistent at best. The initial management response is that testing is the responsibility of the test team and they take steps to “skill-up” with test engineers (who focus on the higher levels of the pyramid) instead of investing time winning the hearts and minds of the developers and empowering the developers and testers to work together to enhance each other’s skills.

Because most organisations focus on automating the UI, we see tools like Selenium Webdriver as one of the most popular (in terms of skills required in jobs adverts). As powerful as Selenium is, it requires technical/programming skills to use – sometimes it might make sense to focus this skillset on the lower levels of the pyramid and then look to other tools for automating the UI and end-to-end tests. There are next generation tools which don’t require coding skills and can encourage other areas of the team to contribute e.g. Subject Matter Experts who are better placed to understand the business risks and increase test coverage against them.

Making an application more testable is often not high priority for delivering software, if it were then there would be more “hooks” to enable testing of business logic and functionality without needing to go through the UI. Instead of considering this constraint and working to address it, businesses tend to invest in tools and consultants to work around the challenges.

At P2 Consulting we’re working on disrupting this anti-pattern to efficient and effective testing. We go deeper than the initial task of automating a bunch of test scripts to look at. Here’s how:

• We work to the right methodologies within a given context to build in quality early

• We enable and coach your project team to share the responsibility of quality and extend the task of automation beyond the test team

• We help you to prioritise what to automate based on your business risks and when it’s best to automate

• We offer advice and consultancy on the tools to use to meet your objectives and how to incorporate testability into the build process

• We have skilled test engineers that will support you to transition to a better way of working and deliver until you can stand on your own feet

To learn more about how we can help your business with test engineering or test and quality assurance, please contact us today.

Luke Barfield, Head of Testing and QA
luke.barfield@p2consulting.com
+44 (0) 7837 259780