What is Test Automation?

Automated testing or Test Automation is the process of running hundreds of test suites using an automation framework and a set of test tools. It is important because it helps in automating some of the repetitive tests — all workflows, fields, scenarios, where manual testing will consume a lot of time and becomes a bottleneck to achieving faster releases.

Automation testing has become mainstream these days and is a vital component for business productivity. It is important that you focus on the most important metrics for automation testing, the effectiveness of your development efforts depend on that. Automated testing metrics quantify the performance of the automated test process.

You need to have clearly defined goals to measure the progress of your automated testing efforts. When you follow certain KPIs and metrics, you will be able to efficiently evaluate the success rate of the deployment, error rates, etc.

Challenges with using test automation metrics:

• There are times when you will get irrelevant results which can completely hamper your measurements.

• Measuring integration and acceptance tests is a challenge as there is poor visibility of these tests. It is easy to track unit tests as they are simple.

• You need to analyse the metric from different standpoints to make judgments about it.

• Selecting the right test automation tools can be difficult at times. You need to ask questions, evaluate a few products, check out customer reviews and see the kind of support that is offered by the vendors.

• Lack of infrastructure support for evaluating the test automation metrics.

Let us look at 4 major test automation metrics:

1. Automation code coverage

2. Automation script effectiveness

3. Requirements coverage

4. Percentage of broken builds

#1 Automation Code Coverage:

Code coverage is the percentage of code that is covered by automated tests. It shows which statements in a code have been executed through a test run and which ones have not. Code coverage holds a major part of a feedback loop in the development process. When tests are developed, automation code coverage tells us which part of the code may be adequately tested and which are the ones that require additional testing. Until coverage meets the specified target, the loop will keep running.

We measure code coverage because:

• It will tell us if there is enough testing in place

• For maintaining the test quality over the lifecycle of a project

• To see how well the codes are tested

#2 Automation Script Effectiveness

This metric provides information on how the defects are being found. If your automation scripts are not finding defects, then you might want to see if these scripts are effective or not. You might see lower effectiveness in your integration environment if different testing environments are used for integration and staging.

Automation Script Effectiveness= (Number of defects found by automation/Number of defects opened)\100*

#3 Requirements coverage:

The effectiveness of a software is determined by its capability to meet the project requirements which are defined by the business stakeholders during the beginning of the development process. Requirements coverage metrics measure your organization’s testing effort and tell you how much of the application was tested.

Requirements coverage=(Number of requirements covered/Total number of scoped requirements for a project)

Apart from having a detailed set of requirements, the project should have a work-in-progress limit, especially since it helps you have a smooth development process. By calculating requirements coverage, you can tell whether to start test execution or if you have to design more tests.

Requirements coverage is an important measure of the maturity of test automation as it tracks how many of the features that were delivered to customers were covered by automation.

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#4 Percentage of broken builds:

The percentage of broken builds is an indicator of the best engineering practices and code quality. The lesser the percentage of broken builds, the better it is for the development process as it means the code is stable and accurate. This metric measures how many builds were broken thanks to the automated test failing.

Build Stability % = (# of build failures / # of builds) \ 100*

Organizations with mature QA practices achieve the goal of continuous delivery and increased user experiences.

Conclusion:

The success of your automation metrics depends on how the automation systems meet the objectives efficiently. You need to be on top of the metrics and keep measuring them with precision and consistency. The metrics that you choose for your test automation should be relevant to your business, simple to track and objective. It should help you find out areas where your automation can be made so much better.

If you are looking to test your application, let Zuci’s test automation engine help you with it. Our test automation framework has a suite of test management tools, CI/CD tools, cloud-hosted platforms, defect management tools, and so on. Zuci’s structured approach makes the automation testing process even more effective.

Looking to improve your test automation coverage? Take a look at Zuci’s test automation services and see how you can leverage Zuci for your business needs.