Test Automation Plans for 2021: Insights from the Testim Community

We asked our Testim Community leaders about their plans for test automation and software quality in 2021. Growing testing coverage,…

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We asked our Testim Community leaders about their plans for test automation and software quality in 2021. Growing testing coverage, accelerating releases through continuous integration, and broadening team access were recurring themes. Read on and let us know if any topics resonated with you in the comments below.

Scaling coverage:
[We’re] building our roadmap to complete automation coverage of our base application. We’re focused on automation of all of our critical functionality in 2021 and incorporating “automation first” where testers experiment with writing automation tests that will fail until fixes are delivered, then add passing tests to our regression library.”
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“We have recently built a new user interface. This year, I have a goal to get our coverage for our new UI to the same level (or better!) as our old UI. As a less measurable goal, I hope to help my team build guidelines on what is a valuable automated test case and what level of automation it belongs in.”
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“Our goal is to first update/maintain regression test cases, so they run seamlessly…100% pass rate is the dream, but if we can get it within just a handful of failed tests, that would be great! Then to increase automated regression test case coverage…by approximately half.
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Focus on teams and continuous testing:
“[In addition to] increasing our automation coverage, getting better at prioritization, and continuing our investment in solid infrastructure (shared components, etc.), I plan to assure the best potential coverage at the lowest cost by revising our automation scope and CI triggers to run what/when/where relevant…I plan to continue self-professional development using the Testim community—meetups, blogs, exchanging experiences. If time permits, I aim to get better at analyzing applications’ behavior (dig into dev code upon test failures).

But above all this, my goal is to turn automation into everyone’s asset by having more automation contributors (involving developers in continuous testing) and enabling anyone to make use of automation feedback, releasing the QA analysis bottleneck in sake of investing human effort in the areas where people do better than machines.”
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Increasing customer adoption through improved infrastructure:
“We are part of the infrastructure organization, and we had an acceptance test framework built out by the end of Q4 last year, and now we need to increase customer adoption. Our feature teams need to start leveraging the alpha version of this framework and give feedback on what can be improved.”

Implementing new quality standards:
“We are intentionally going light on metrics. It’s being incorporated into a broader effort to rewrite several microservices & take others from manual testing into CI/CD pipelines. So it’s really just a number of components shifted from legacy to our new standards.”

Moving closer to CI/CD:
“We are looking to finally get our test suite running against each PR as it moves to the review stage. It won’t be CI, but it’s as close as we can get with our test environment set up.”
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“My automation goals this year focus on integration to CI/CD pipeline and an increase of the test automation percentage to meet our corporate goal of at least 10%.”
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“We are hoping to get closer to a CD environment based on testing results. Before we are ready though, we need to clean up some of our inconsistent tests in Testim and add some additional testing in other areas to ensure we have a high enough coverage in all areas of our application. Plus, the dream is always 100% pass rate on all Testim tests, so we humans don’t have to do much and can use our time in other places.”

Expanding the use of Testim’s features:
“As a beginner working with Testim, my goals are: (1) Create more tests, one every day, the goal is to have tests for all important and necessary features; (2) explore more features of testim; (3) create tests faster due to more reusability.”
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“Our main focuses this year are: using APIs with Testim to get the big tests done in the leanest possible way; enabling CLI for better scheduling and management; getting better on [Testim’s] reusability aspect by creating mindful and extremely modular building blocks that fit everywhere with minimum efforts.
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“We plan to [double] test coverage and add API tests. We finally got the chance to use the branching feature in Testim to incorporate the new branding process we have, and we love it.”

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