"The enterprises of the present digital era are widely in need of delivering faster products to the market in order to compete with the growing business needs. This has exclusively increased the need for and usage of automation testing. Also, the present Agile and DevOps environments too contribute to increasing the significance of automation testing. Despite the increasing demand, there are even many concerns that affect the usage of automation testing. Being aware of these automation testing concerns will help enterprises to overcome them and leverage the benefits with automation testing."

Automation testing has gained much importance in recent times for accelerating faster software releases. With the abundant amount of benefits it helps to achieve, automation testing tools have become a good companion for many developments and testing teams. Also, compared to manual testing, automation testing is the superior method.

But, there even a few problems to be overcome while practicing automation testing. These can be more challenging if they are faced without any preparation. It will be easier for the teams to overcome when they gain an idea about the problem.

6 Common problems with Automation Testing

1. Challenge of Initial Cost Investment: In order to setup automation, the initial cost requirement is too high as it involves the purchasing of automation tools, maintenance of test scripts, training on the automation tool, etc. Though, the further results obtained from automation testing helps to improve the Return on Investment (ROI). The initial cost requirements are the common problems that every enterprise needs to overcome.

2. Challenge to have skilled resources: To automate the test cases on automation tools, it is very essential to have skilled resources who have good knowledge of programming. Hence, before building a testing team, verifying the capabilities of the teams is a common problem. It is important to have skilled resources who can adapt to any new technology and enhance their business growth.

3. Challenge to balance Environment Issues: While performing automation, most of the testers focus on finding the functional bugs. Though is essential, it is even important to consider environmental issues. Though delivery pipeline is the essential one to be focussed, it is even an essential look on the test environment issues. Ignoring them can affect the testing and development process and fail the deployment process.

4. Challenge due to Poor Testing Practices: The method of automating test cases is good but, it can be effective only when it is practiced with the best practices. Poor testing practices will gradually impact inconsistency in the documentation, and may not be successful in finding the defects. Hence, automation has to be preferred only when the teams run the best testing practices.

5. Challenge to maintain automated tests: When there is any change or update made in the software, it is essential to do the same in the tests to make them run successfully. If these automated tests are not maintained well, then these may drastically affect test automation. Also, when more effort is taken to update the tests, it many cause running them again manually, affecting test automation.

6. Challenge due to Improper testing approach: For automation in testing, not only test scripts, but the testing approach is also an important need for the present frequently changing Agile environment. The benefits of automation can be achieved if these are performed with poor practices. Due to poor test practices, there will be an immense effect on the test suites and test scripts affecting the test results. Hence, it is crucial to have a proper testing approach.

Conclusion:

Most of the enterprises are transitioning from the traditional methods to the new agile testing methods and this has effectively called the need for automation testing. Also, with the belief of automation testing superior to manual testing, automation testing has become a favorite practice for many testers. But, even this superior method can be affective, if it is not practiced with effective methods.

Hence, teams are required to understand the concerns so that they can overcome the automation testing concerns for successful testing practice. Leverage automation testing services from next-gen QA testing services provider to enhance your test automation environment.