Automation challenges

Hello guys !!

I thought about sharing something that we all have gone through at some point of our career. Some of these challenges are related to lack of standards, knowledge and processes, but some others are related to company’s culture and people’s mindset (this is the biggest challenge and most difficult to change).

I have posted about the difference between a growth mindset and a fixed mindset some years ago, after joining  a workshop where Joanna Chwastowska (Engineering Lead at Google) explains how she learned to have a growth mindset, this picture below summarizes it:


Basically, we are always learning and you shouldn’t feel ashamed to admit that 🙂



What scenarios should I have for this layer of tests ? What type of tests should I be responsible for ? These should be the questions that you first ask when deciding the scope of your tests. For each layer you need to have a different scope otherwise you are not only going to duplicate scenarios, but also have an extensive pipeline that is hard/impossible to maintain.  

Decide what are the layers that you are going to cover: Unit, Integration, E2E Tests… then decide what scenarios for each layer. So, for the Unit tests you need to have an extensive number of scenarios covering edge cases (special characters, etc), then integration between components and finally e2e tests on top with a reduced scope and no mocks. You should also consider UI tests comparing snapshots if you have a frontend as well.  


Team collaboration

Make sure you have a team that is working towards the same goal, improve the communication as much as possible. Do workshops, demos, pair-programming, code reviews, get feedback so you can continue to improve until you find the best way to work and at the same time make the business happy.

Understand the expectations and align them, there is nothing better than having a nice bunch of people to spend ~8 hours together for 5 days a week and achieving something together.


Time constraints

How many releases do you have per day ? How many projects are you allocated in ? How many developers do you have in your team ? You might have noticed that you usually have more than one developer for each QA in a team, and this is okay, as long as you manage what you are going to test, you can’t save the world, don’t test everything, focus on the end-user flow above everything else as this is the front door of the product.

Something you need to take into account is the scope of the regression pack, you probably want to have automation for that, right ? I am completely against having manual tests for the regression pack, unless there is a strong reason why.


Finding elements

Do you remember when you couldn’t click on that element because there was a div on top of it ? This is one of the problems you might have faced already, or maybe was a bad structured xpath ? or too many elements with the same css-selector ?

If you are testing react apps, here is something that helped when doing the tests, I’ve asked the developers to add one a data-test attribute: data-test, data-test-id, data-testid or data-cy to the elements. Adding this kind of attribute is considered a best practice since makes the automation resilient to change and it is dedicated for tests.


Flaky tests

Yeah… we all know the struggle is REAL !

I’ve faced this issue recently when doing tests with Espresso on android apps, instead of using waits remember to use idling resources which synchronizes the subsequent operations in a UI test.

For the react apps you can use frameworks like Cypress, Testcafe and Detox that runs in the same run-loop as the application being tested and can automatically wait for assertions and commands before moving ahead.

These are some of the reasons you can have flaky tests, but there are some other reasons like:

  • Environment/server is not stable
  • 3rd party system integration is not stable
  • Concurrency tests
  • Caching
  • Setup/teardown tests
  • Dynamic content

Identify the reason first to be able to take the correct action, but definitely tag this test as soon as possible since you won’t be able to trust on it until it has been fixed.



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