Automation Development Life Cycle

Automation Development Life Cycle-

The Automation Development Life Cycle involves in parallel with the system development  lifecycle. The Automation Development Life Cycle involves a new structured, building-block approach to the entire test lifecycle, with the help pf this software test professionals to approach software testing in a methodical and repeatable fashion. Automation Development Life Cycle methodology also supports the development and management of test data and the test environment, and addresses test documentation to include problem reports.

The methodology represents a structured approach, This helps the testers to away from the comman mistakes

Phases of Automation Development Life cycle-

1.Automation Feasibility Analysis- 
Feasibility Analysis plays an important role in automation testing. Basically it can be referred as a checklist against which we need to check if the particular test case can be automated.
From the point of automation, few points which can be found in any checklist are as follows:
If all steps are documented properly in the test case.
If the test case needs to be executed only one time, then we can test it using manual testing as automation testing is quite useful if we are going to be used in regression pack only.
Objects in the application can be identified by automation tool or not.
Most important point is ROI (Return of Investment).
Now I would like to throw some more light on ROI.

2.Test Strategy-
Test Strategy is also known as test approach defines how testing would be carried out. Test approach has two techniques:

Proactive - An approach in which the test design process is initiated as early as possible in order to find and fix the defects before the build is created.

Reactive - An approach in which the testing is not started until after design and coding are completed.

Following are the types of test automation framework:

?    Record and Playback Framework
?    Functional Decomposition Framework
?    Keyword/Table Driven Framework
?    Data Driven Framework
?    Hybrid Framework
?    Business Process Framework

3.Environment Set up-
It is ideal to execute test automation scripts in regression environment. Test environment set up phase has following tasks:

Sufficient tool licenses
Sufficient add-ins licenses
Sufficient utilities like comparison tools, advance text editors etc.
Implementation of automation framework
AUT access and valid credentials

4.  Test Script Development

This phase is the inception of implementing test automation. Activities of Automation test engineers as follows:

Object Identification
Creating Function Libraries
Building the scripts
Unit testing the scripts
Warm-up test execution

5.Test Script Execution

Execute Script
Updat the execution or coverage tracker
Log the all defect

6. Test Result Generation and Analysis

Analysis the result
Generate Report
Documents all the issues.Collect the knowledge
Prepare for client presentation