Automation Score Card Quiz (What's Your Score?) with Joe Colantonio

Get ready to discover the most actionable end to end automation advice for some of the smartest testers on the planet. Hey, I'm Joe Calantonio, host of the Test Guild Automation Podcast and my goal is to help you succeed with creating Automation Awesomeness.

Hey it's Joe and Welcome to episode 458 of the Test Guild Automation Podcast. It's been a while since I did a solo episode, so today I want to share with you the audio for a video I just created for YouTube. Hey, by the way, my YouTube is blowing up, so if you haven't subscribed yet, you definitely want to. But anyway, the name of the video is called Cracking the Code to Test Automation Success, focusing on six key areas and the six key areas were an idea I actually got from One of the 260 quotes in my new book, Automation Awesomeness 260 Actual affirmations to improve your QA and automation testing skills that you can get on Amazon right now by going to test guild.com forward/automation book. And so I expand on the idea for an Automation scorecard that I got from Jonathan Wright who talked about it in episode 38 way back in 2015 and the device is just as good today as it was back then. So if you don't have an automation scorecard you should.

And if you don't, I made it.

Wicked easy for you. So I created a free resource called the Automation Scorecard Quiz where you could take a deep dive to find out where your current automation score is and ways to improve it so you and team can really succeed creating Automation Awesomeness.

And to find that resource all you.

Need to do is go to test guild.com forward/score and I also mentioned more.

About and go into detail about it.

In this episode and all these links I mentioned already will be in the show notes that you can get at by going to test guild.com forward/A458 all right, so listen up to these six key areas. I really think it's going to improve your automation and let me know your thoughts.

This episode of the Test Guild Automation.

Podcast is sponsored by the Test Guild.

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Hey, welcome back to my channel. Today we'll be diving into a great approach to make sure you're creating high value, reliable test automation. Do you find yourself ever questioning every step of your testing process? If not, you might just start doing so after watching this video.

You're in luck because I'm going to.

Be introducing you to a quick time saving tool called the Automation Scorecard. Our scorecard evaluates the quality of your test automation scripts through six crucial areas. No matter what automation testing tool you use, if it's Selenium, Cypress, Playwright, uft, doesn't matter. These six principles apply universally and what's more, we've created a fun quiz to help you and your teams evaluate your current performance based on these six areas and provide you with ways to improve. Just head on over to test skill.com score. I'll have that in the comments down below. But first let's get familiar with these six areas. Sound good? Let's do it. The first one is maintainability. This is all about how easily a test script or suite can be updated or modified to adapt to changes in the software under test, and also how easily any issue within the test itself can be diagnosed and fixed, and how clear and understandable the code is and its documentation for both current users and more critically, future users. A maintainable test script is well structured, follows good coding practices, is well documented, and can be readily understood and updated, reducing the time and effort required for its upkeep. And there's many ways you can use to improve your automation maintainability. Once again, I'll have a link down below where you can get the checklist for this. I'll just go over a few of them, but there's much more than the ones I'm going to go over in this video to help save time. First one is readability. You're going to spend more time reading scripts than you actually do writing them. So if your tests aren't readable, they're not going to be maintainable. And the second one is writing modular code. So breaking your test scripts or test cases into small manageable functions that could be easily updated or reused. And this is just two of about 20 that I have in that checklist down below. The second key area is is it relevant to the business? So I always say the degree to which the tests align with invalidate the business requirements and objectives. That's the key if it's relevant to the business. So it's about ensuring that the functionality test is meaningful to end users. It contributes to the overall business goals. And the test catches any deviations that might impact business operations or user experience. It also underscores the importance of prioritizing test automation efforts on the most impactful aspects of of the software from a business perspective. So that's focusing on risk more than anything is what I find key in this area. So, two key ways to make your automation more relevant to the business. And once again, there's about 20 of these that I'll have in that checklist down below. The first one is make sure it aligns with your business goal. As you're running your test, make sure you always ask yourself, is this aligning with the business goals? Do I understand the business goals and am I designing my test to validate the most important features and functionality and to achieve those goals? If the answer is no, delete the.

Test or don't write the test.

The second one is risk based testing. You want to identify and prioritize test based on the risk and impact of the potential failure. So features with high business impact should be tested more thoroughly.

All right.

The third area of the scorecard is clear traceability. And this is all about the ability to easily link test cases and test results and back to the respective requirements or user stories. This ensures that each test has a specific purpose tied to a functionality or performance of the application or software under test. And clear traceability allows stakeholders to understand what is being tested, why it's being tested, and how the test results relate back to the project's overall objectives. It's crucial for effective reporting, understanding test coverage, and verifying all the business requirements of being properly validated. So two key areas or ways to help you make your automated tests more traceable. You want to map tests to the requirements. So explicitly link each test case to the specific requirement or use a story it validates. So when I did this back in the day, we had a cucumber based framework I used to tag test cases or the test with the tag and the name or the identifier of the of the requirement. So anytime I needed to just run tests that link back to that requirement, I would just do that tag and at the command line and it would spit out just the test that had that tag. So that was one way to map tests to requirements. As an example. So you want to name your tests in a way that clearly indicates their purpose and the functionality of the testing. You don't have to look at a bunch of test cases and go, what did I mean when I named that X and Y and Z? You want to be able to look.

At it right away and know what.

It does, what it means and what it's going to test for you. It's going to help you, it's going to help people on your team. It's also going to help you debug later on because you're going to have a clear name for the test to know when it fails, why it failed. Most likely, the fourth area of the scorecard you should be focusing on is reusability. So the ability of test scripts or components of test scripts to be used in multiple test scenarios or across different projects. So reusability reduces the effort and time needed for creating and maintaining test scripts and and increasing consistency. It's all about making modularly designed tests where common functionalities are encapsulated into reusable functions or classes. So I've been on teams that have multiple sprint teams and each team has their own login, but they all do the same thing. This is a code smell to let you know that your tests probably are not readable. You want to reduce as much duplication as possible. It's going to help make your test more reusable because everyone will know which login to use because there's only one of them. That's one example. So two ways to help improve your automation to make it more reusable. Once again, there's more in the checklist down below, but the first one for this is modularize your test scripts. So break down your test scripts into smaller reusable functions or methods. This is going to enable you to reuse these components across multiple tests. And the second one, probably that you get the most bang for your buck on reusability, is leveraging a test framework. So using a test framework that supports reusability from the start, such as those that provide setup and tear down methods of those that support data driven testing while you having to code it from scratch, is a great way to get reusability out of the box using an already existing framework. So the fifth main area is making sure that your tests are manageable and scalable. So this means ease of managing the test suite and its ability to grow or adapt while your software on the test is also growing. So manageable means the test suite is well organized, easy to navigate and can be efficiently updated or adjusted. It also implies that the test execution, monitoring and reporting are streamlined and user friendly. The scalable piece refers to the test suite's capability or capacity to handle growth, whether it's the form of increased test cases, more complex scenarios or expanded software. Functionality. Scalable tests can be easily extended and can maintain performance despite increased demands. So I speak to a lot of folks. Sometimes running the automation test is okay. The problem comes when you're trying to scale it. So if you don't start when thinking about am I making these tests manageable and scalable from the beginning, it's going to be very hard to really scale up from that initial small test suite to thousands of automated tests. So, two key ways you can use to make your automation more manageable and scalable. Number one, following coding standards. You want to adhere to a consistent coding convention standards. This makes the code base easier to understand, maintain and expand. And if you're not doing code reviews for your automation tests, you should be or you should have some sort of sniffer that can, when you check in code, make sure that it's following a convention or standard. It's going to help things. Especially if you work across multiple Sprint teams. You want to make sure you have consistency across each of those teams when they're writing their automated test. The second one is you want to run your test as often as possible. This will help you know whether your test are reliable, which if they are, makes them more manageable and scalable. So definitely look into continuous integration and continuous delivery if you're not already. You want to incorporate your test into a CI CD pipeline to manage and run them automatically, making the process more manageable and scalable for everybody. Right. The sixth area of the scorecard and the last one is accessible across the company. So your test scripts, results and related documentation needs to be readily available and understandable to various stakeholders within the organization. This includes testers, developers, project managers, business analysts and sometimes even upper management. I used to have to report to upper management every quarter to say where we are with the test, what the results were, what was a failure, what wasn't really a failure, where we are, how we're going to improve, and one of the main reasons why we had it. That is because we didn't have a real accessible dashboard, which we then did built later on that made it easy for anyone to look at the results. This helped save us time. So the test suite and its outputs should be in a format that's also easily digestible for non technical staff. And ideally, the tool you use for testing should ideally have user friendly interfaces that multiple team members can navigate. This encourages transparency, improves collaboration and ensures that everyone involved can gain insights from the testing process. You want to make sure you have the whole team involved in doing automation, not just one person on a Sprint Team should be a full team effort and a way to do that is make sure you're making your tests as accessible as possible. So ways to make your automation test more accessible across the company. Two main ways. Once again there are more of these ways that you can get in the checklist. Down below is one. Maintain clear documentation. So clearly document your test cases, processes and results so they're easy for all stakeholders to understand. You also want to implement a testing dashboard, so use dashboards that provide high level overviews of test results, making the information readily digestible for non technical stakeholders and for your whole team. It also is going to save you time because they're not relying on you to have to report all the time. All this should be automated to a dashboard that people can read and take care of for themselves. Hey, if you want more tips like this, I actually got this from Jonathan Wright as well. One of the tips in my automation awesomeness 260 actual affirmations to improve your QA and automation testing skills. I call it a one page a day book. Basically you have as you open up the book you have a quote from one of the 600 experts that I interviewed on my podcast for an actual piece of advice they recommend to help improve your automation. I then have a daily actual awesomeness area where you can reflect on or learn how you can implement what the expert advised you to do. And there's also a little journal piece where you can write your thoughts for the day. It takes less than five minutes a day and if you go through it each business day of your year after the year, you will achieve what we like to call Automation awesomeness. So before we wrap it up, I have a challenge for you. Think about your last test automation script or test execution using the scorecard that I have in the link down below and evaluate how well it performed. How can it be approved? What could be improved? What can you do to make things better? And share your thoughts in the comment section down below. All right, that's it for today. Don't forget to subscribe and hit the bell icon for more insights into the world of automation testing. All right, for links of everything of.

Value we covered in today's episode, head on over to test guild.com a458 so.

That'S it for this episode of the.

Test Guild Automation Podcast. I'm Joe and my mission is to.

Help you succeed in creating end to.

End and full stack automation awesomeness. As always, test everything and keep the good. Cheers. Hey, thanks again for listening.

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