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Scaling Selenium using technology and process support

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Test automation is, simply, the practice of using scripted methods to accelerate the execution of test suites, typically for regression libraries.

On 20th November 2019, Tricentis, the continuous testing and test automation tooling provider, published a new guide to help quality leaders increase the value of their Selenium-based automation efforts.

“Even if an organisation commits to creating an automation suite that covers an entire application, the test suite will grow linearly as development progresses,” states Matt Heusser in this guide, produced for Tricentis. “Six months in, automation delay [could well] slow down [overall software] delivery.”

So, contrary to initial aims, test automation maintenance may end up costing firms more time.

Based on conversations with our community, quality leaders are recognising that automating test suites using open-source tooling – rather than a proprietary tool – is a software development project of its own. 

Developing bespoke test automation in parallel to the core software delivery lifecycle (SDLC) may fail, due to lack of dedicated resources, need for test data exclusivity from core development and inadequate support.

Further, changes to the code base often cause automated test suites to break. This inflection point may be difficult to predict, but the best practices proposed in this guide may well enable financial and eCommerce firms to increase operational test automation efficiency.

By downloading this paper, you will discover how to scale Selenium-based test automation in these five areas:

  • structure, focusing on initial environment setup;
  • process, evaluating an independent SDLC for test automation;
  • architecture; identifying an effective pipeline and development patterns;
  • parallelism; investigating how to scale infrastructure as the code base expands; and
  • support; specifically, how to extend open-source frameworks for the enterprise.

Though it may be tempting to forge ahead by building Selenium scripts without a sober assessment of these areas, often test automation failures can be traced back to gaps in one of these five areas.

Bringing transparency to open source code, or indeed the ability of quality leaders at financial and eCommerce firms to manage open source risk are emerging as key priorities leading into 2020.

Download 17 ways to Scale Selenium test automation for the Enterprise to identify an effective strategy for increasing returns on your automation investments.