Best Strategies for Maintaining and Updating Automated Test Suites

Automation testing is essential for many software development teams’ success as it reduces the likelihood of upcoming software problems. One prevalent misperception is that automation may be used to provide instant quality. QA teams begin to expect their automation suites to provide 100% coverage, require no maintenance, and produce work of the highest caliber overnight. There are numerous instances where test automation has been implemented to increase testing efficiency and quality.

Automated testing may not always simplify your testing process; it may make suite maintenance more difficult. Updating a Test Automation suite with unclear goals results in excessive expenses, a lack of flexibility, and an inability to assess the anticipated return on investment.

Teams working on software development and testing depend more on automated checks to ensure their product is up to business and customer standards for quality. For this precise reason, many businesses are implementing automated solutions. The global test automation market is expected to grow at a strong compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15.4% from 2017 to 2025, reaching $109.69 billion, according to analysis by Transparency Market Research.

Fixing test cases to keep them current with ongoing code changes is known as test maintenance.

Businesses frequently have codes that update themselves in response to new application upgrades. Maintaining your test script through manual or automation testing ensures that it is updated with any changes made to the code. Your company will save money and time with high-quality tests on your side if you conduct routine test maintenance. For instance, to prevent failure, even the test must adapt if the identifying attribute of a UI element (ID, class, or Xpath) changes.

It is important because test maintenance reduces the time and expense of writing tests. Test maintenance allows you to update or remove data from your existing tests without continuously creating new ones. It makes automation testing easier, continuously upholds test quality, and enhances automation testing scripts to execute complex tests.

Types of Maintenance Testing

There are two types of maintenance testing that testers must work on when maintaining tests:

Confirmation Maintenance Test

This type of maintenance test validates updated code. To ensure there are no functional issues or downtime, you must track all changes, large and small, made to your code when performing this type of maintenance testing.

Regression Maintenance Testing

This type follows the confirmatory maintenance testing phase, focusing on testing the current functionality. After changing the code, the entire program is run to ensure the current functionality is correct. We call this entire process regression testing.

The following are some typical difficulties you could run into when performing test maintenance:

• If your team lacks the necessary resources and expertise, they may struggle to control the time and expense of maintaining the tests.
• If you cannot find a test automation tool to evaluate faulty or false positives.
• Maintaining the test maintenance process and keeping the tests up to date with code changes might be challenging when there is poor or delayed communication between the developers and testers.
• Testing tools that cannot identify GUI elements and the following alterations will challenge your team.
• Sometimes, testers and developers need more skills to comprehend requirements and maintain tests, either manually or using tools.

Two basic types of processes are included in test maintenance. Let’s look at each of these situations separately.

• Finding the reason behind test failures should be the first step in solving them. Unanticipated side effects, behavioral changes, or software flaws might bring it on. It can be essential to update the tests, fix the code, or perhaps both.
• Modifications may be required to guarantee smooth integration within the automation in response to changes in the dependencies of automation testing tools, such as reporting tools or APIs. This maintenance category also entails educating developers on updated tool infrastructure if necessary.
• Cloud Testing is the process of verifying the quality of software on a real-device cloud. Cloud testing tools like LambdaTest ensure a better experience in performing different types of automation maintenance.

LambdaTest plays a crucial role in easing the challenges associated with test maintenance through its robust features and capabilities. Test maintenance involves updating and adapting tests to accommodate changes in applications or environments, and LambdaTest offers several functionalities that contribute to this process.

• LambdaTest is an AI-powered test orchestration and execution platform to run manual and automated tests at scale. The platform allows you to perform real-time and automation testing across 3000+ environments and real mobile devices.
• It allows testers to perform cross-browser testing on various browsers and browser versions. This ensures that applications are compatible with various user environments. By identifying issues early on, testers can proactively address them, reducing the need for extensive maintenance later.
• The platform supports parallel testing, enabling simultaneous execution of tests across multiple browsers and environments. This significantly reduces the time required for test runs, allowing teams to iterate quickly. With faster feedback cycles, teams can promptly address issues, minimizing the impact on test maintenance.

You can continuously modify the script to match code changes to maintain a test. Monitor code changes, adjust the data, and test script steps accordingly. But do you believe that maintaining a test in this manner is feasible? What if every test script needed to be manually changed due to a significant update that affected several sections of the application? This looks like a laborious, time-consuming, and even error-prone process.

Furthermore, it is not a long-term solution to manually maintain the scripts. Here are some best practices to adhere to when maintaining a test, which is not a one-person job, regardless of whether it is automated or manual.

Neglecting maintenance might lead to future costs for automated testing tools, which are a vital component. Using best practices can help reduce the maintenance needed for automation testing, which can assist in mitigating this.

Simplify your automation design

To simplify your automation testing maintenance process, it is important to simplify your automation suite. Even though it may seem more difficult, practicing simple Selenium test automation scripts can significantly improve your productivity. You can perform low-level tests quickly by minimizing and focusing your maintenance efforts.

Adding unnecessary complexity to your test suite increases the chance of failure. However, it is best to create reusable tests in situations where complexity is required.

Simplify test maintenance with variables and the page object model

Centralizing locator and method changes and leveraging the page object model are key components of effective test automation maintenance. Tests instantly reflect updates made in one place, saving you time and effort. Additionally, using variables instead of hard-coded values ​​makes tests easier to write and maintain and promotes code reuse.

Improve the user experience with an updated UI

The UI should be updated regularly to maintain a seamless experience. UI/UX developers often forget to consider automated testing when writing code. To solve this problem, you must regularly implement a naming convention for each object and conduct Automation Testing.

Improving Test Execution Plans

Adopting a smart test execution strategy can maximize efficiency when maintaining automated tests. To cover important test cases, automate testing focusing on repetitive maintenance tests. This method ensures comprehensive test coverage and efficient problem detection, saving time and effort. Increase productivity and build software that meets high standards using smarter work instead of unnecessary testing cycles.

Write test code using DRY principles

Reduce duplication of test code bases and simplify maintenance of automated tests. The DRY (Don’t Reply Yourself) principle eliminates duplicate code and ensures a more effective and reliable test suite. Use data factories and paradigms like the page object model to centralize common functionality, simplify updates, and improve test readability.

Maintain the integrity of automated test suites and quickly resolve failed tests

Ignoring failed tests or prioritizing new test cases over problem resolution can hinder automation efforts. Test suite issues must be resolved quickly to maintain efficiency and code quality. By fixing problems as they occur, software developers can take advantage of broken window theory to avoid future degradation. To ensure a stable and reliable test suite. Maintain the overall integrity of the testing process by proactively resolving failed tests and avoiding complacency.

Automated testing prioritizes high-value, unstable features

It is important to consider which test automation features must be automated carefully to reduce maintenance effort. Focusing your automation efforts on valuable and unpredictable aspects will help your tests work as efficiently as possible. Prioritize automated tests that cover important business value cases rather than just focusing on the superficial functionality of your application. This strategic approach ensures effective and reliable testing procedures by minimizing maintenance efforts associated with test automation.

Automate Reports on Tests for Efficient Analysis

Continuous improvement in test automation depends on tracking and evaluating test results. You can expedite the process of pinpointing areas needing enhancement and evaluating the stability of various features by automating test results. Time is saved, and important information from test results is guaranteed to be easily accessible for future use. Combining Selenium with frameworks like pytest can greatly minimize maintenance efforts for test automation while improving the insights obtained from automation testing.

Impact analysis of any new enhancements

Impact analysis is an important part of responsible requirements management. It provides an accurate view of the impact of the proposed change on the application and how it may affect the application. This helps Teams make informed business decisions about acceptable changes. The analysis examines the proposed change to identify the modules to be created, modified, or dropped and to estimate the effort involved in implementing the change. The lack of impact analysis does not change the size of the task, but shockingly, it is recommended to keep the scope the same. Based on the analysis, QA should plan to update the affected automated scripts during the sprints.

Automate at API level/ lesser UI automation

The most popular automation that test engineers continue to execute is user interface tests. Most agile teams prefer UI-level automation. However, after a few months of starting the automation, the teams frequently discover that the expense of maintaining UI-level tests outweighs the advantages of the automation. Therefore, it is recommended that test engineers automate their application at the API level because doing so reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO) and improves script durability.

Regular test maintenance is essential since developers often change the code to support new features, UI adjustments, and user requests. Automation testing can efficiently identify errors in the most recent code by maintaining current test cases. However, if test maintenance is not properly handled, it can become time-consuming. Selecting an automation testing platform that facilitates test automation maintenance is crucial to overcoming this difficulty and allowing for the quick and easy maintenance of automated test cases.