I’ve seen automation fail and succeed through different engagements. I’ve noticed some patterns and have created the following prerequisite Automation Principles. Having these in place will as least minimise your risk of failure.
Failure patterns tend to be:
- Monolithic ‘one size fits all’ solutions – attempting to replicate a pattern that was successful elsewhere into a completely different environment
- Managers in charge of automation that aren’t technical enough, cannot understand the technology solutions in place and are being lead by engineers that tend to work in silos
- A pattern of working that doesn’t encourage Automation to be engaged as far left as possible – if you are throwing ‘over the fence’ to automation then this is strategy for failure. This could be simply attempting to automate the manual test scripts or developing a solution and then letting the automation team attempt to figure out how to automate
- A solution that hasn’t factored in the environment (People, process, politics, technology, skills) – a good manager will assess the agile environment and map an appropriate way forward.
With the advent of iterative cycles, incrementation development and frequent delivery – Continue reading