Discover the approach Clean test and its philosophy in automation testing.
How many of you have never experienced test automation issues in your IT projects?
Did you know that by experience, we find that more than 50% of functional test automation projects are failures ?!
As these projects are often too complicated and expensive to maintain, there are many causes of failure. In order to avoid these pitfalls, it is of course better to implement a real test automation strategy. But you also need to be able to understand the usefulness of a test automation framework, and know how to choose the right framework in relation to your needs and technical and human constraints.
But once these prerequisites have been acquired, it is necessary to ensure the quality of the code produced. Unlike software development projects, it is rarer to plan code reviews on these subjects, yet it can be very useful to define and share good practices in order to guarantee the long-term success of your development project of test automation.
Development teams are well aware of the difficulties they are exposed to: structural erosion of design and architecture, software debt or decay, software entropy and rampant accidental complexity, defect-fixing races that call for more defects to be corrected. , loss of control over the cost of change over time, etc. So many pitfalls that threaten the productivity of the teams and the profitability of the products they deliver!
However, automating tests is completely part of development activities: automating tests means developing automated tests and their components. Why wouldn’t automation be exposed to the same risks of loss of efficiency and productivity of teams ? Experience shows in any case that if the intention to automate functional, non-functional or regression tests is laudable, there is a long way to go between this intention and obtaining the expected benefits. Even more, it is a question of preserving these benefits over time, because there is a gap between successfully automating a few tests and scaling up several hundred, or even several thousand, depending on the level of testing considered in the software testing pyramid.
Testing is often mistakenly seen as the poor relation of software development, and the quality of test code suffers greatly. It is therefore a question of guarding against the pitfalls common to the development of automated tests and that their source code is exemplary.
In order to achieve this, ALL4TEST has developed an offer called Clean Test with the collaboration of partners such as PROMYZE. The clean test approach is tooled coaching with high added value inspired by the concepts of Clean Code.
1. Analysis of your automation strategy and your code
Audit of your test automation strategy and existing test code by sampling.
2. Action plan
• Match test automation effort to test level first
• Validate the adequacy of your test automation framework / your needs afterwards
This optimization is applicable to your different test levels (unit, integration, system or EtE).
Here are some examples of issues raised by our customers:
• Identify what makes your tests unstable, times out, false positives and propose an action plan to deal with these points
• Reduce test execution times and test maintenance time
• Facilitate code maintenance and therefore reduce maintenance costs
Exemple of test framework architecture
3. Resources implemented in the clean test approach
Acompaignment by an automation expert in partnership with Promyze, in order to be able to use their best practices management tool inspired by clean code:
- Regular code reviews
- Test kata
- Test retrospective
- Tooled coaching
- Sharing best practices with the Promyze tool
3.1. Identification of good practices on the source code
The coach identifies the good practices to be implemented directly on the source code of the project and sets up a tool for sharing clean test rules.
3.2. Presentation of these new clean test best practices
The coach presents the new good practices to be implemented to the team during a workshop.
3.3. Validation and sharing of good code practices
Validated practices are found in the team’s repository with the associated sample code. Practices are also accessible from IDEs and a code review plugin for Chrome and Firefox.
4. Benefits targeted by the Clean test approach
- Establishment of a culture of testing and code quality: Clean code
- Obtaining a durable test code
- Capitalization of achievements via a catalog of good practices
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