Test Automation in Large Scale

Digital businesses must adapt to new functionalities into production on daily basis to take full advantage of the flexibility offered by the virtual world.

Automation for digital business is not science fiction. It’s real and happening today. For one of the largest U.S. Federal programs, more than half a million business process were automated every day in 2 hours on more than 100 virtual machines.

In another example, a global manufacturer of luxury brands validates their core business processes worldwide with 600 hours of automation on more than 30 virtual machines every day!

We can see every day that today’s digital technology projects take place on a swift timeline than ever before, where typical projects last days-to-weeks rather than months-to-years.

Large-scale automation makes it possible to deploy this new business functionality early and often – while significantly mitigating risks of business disruption or major glitches during the process.

The real world scenario explained in three words

FAST  FREQUENT  FLAWLESS

The quality of application is determined by its swiftness, frequency of updates and defects

Automation is the key. Test Automation for process validation and functional testing allows you to run through literally millions of business process steps just like the end users, to validate that no code is broken.

Though test automation services does not look a very rewarding or a feasible option due to the costs involved in setting up the environment or the tools – but definitely, in the long run, its benefits surely surpass the initial glitches.

It is said, that “there’s a method for every madness”.

To maximize the ROI using Test Automation, a specific plan of action is required.

What actually might set up the best way of implementing large scale test automation so as to maximize ROI?

1. Robust Product Road Map: When organizations begin to automate anything, they should ensure that they have a clear goal set. There should be absolute clarity on the product road map and on the automation check list. Else, there will be confusion and chaos around the whole process and the efforts prove to be a big scale failure. Hence, defining the product roadmap is a must.
2. Optimized Test Process: To meet a defined roadmap, a clear demarcation of the test process is a must. The test process must be defined keeping in mind the risks, costs, and training involved while implementing test automation.
3. The Framework: Whether it is a data-driven or a keyword-driven framework, or a hybrid one, defining and selecting a framework will have a definite positive impact on the ROI as it will implement the road map you defined earlier.
4. Tools to be used: Though testers have a wide variety of choice for testing solutions, wrong decisions regarding the test automation tools can lead to effects that may not be reversible. Therefore, selecting the right tools is a business-critical requirement for ensuring successful test runs. All variables such as integration, installation, cost, maintenance, and compatibility with the testing environment must be considered while selecting a tool.
5. Script Management: The scope of script management usually floats around the areas of the standard process that are well documented, logging the errors that are generated, and most importantly testing if the script was written is able to withstand unexpected behaviors.
6. Manual Effort: Automation is an end result of a lot of manual activities such as script and test case writing, setting up the machines and selecting the tests, and once the test is run – analyze the results. These cannot be done in a jiffy, and need to be planned for both costs and efforts.
7. Testing Team: If an organization realizes the significance of the manual effort required, it must give a due diligence while planning the work and effort estimation with regards to the team and the skills required for the implementation of test automation.
8. True Measure of Success: A few good examples of this definition may include measuring benefits such as faster time to market, improved ROI, or, on the other hand, the number of bugs have decreased.

Scaling up with virtual machines

The automation framework can be run on masses of virtual machines in the cloud to get scale.

During automated business process validation, each of these machines interacts with the applications, running through all complex business scenarios with real time data. This verifies that things are working as expected. The machines will only be turned up on demand and can be decommissioned when the scenarios finish executing.

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