Technology is in constant progress, this also applies to development methodologies, currently speed and efficiency are really valuable for organizations, that’s why process automation has gained importance to speed up processes that were previously executed manually.
Here’s where CI / CD ,— Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery comes in place, CI /CD is a set of jobs that are executed to automatically to deploy applications in their different environments when they comply with certain conditions to make sure the application is ready to be delivered. One of those conditions is QA Testing. Please remember we’re discussing an automated process therefore QA Tests must be automated, there shouldn’t be any human intervention, to perform automated testing the QA Engineer has to aid his work with Automation Frameworks.
Before we continue with Automation Frameworks it’s important to discuss an important concept related to Test Automation, it is the Testing Pyramid, this pyramid is a test distribution strategy. The following graph explains it better:
This distribution recommends that unit testing must be written in large quantity, then integration tests should be written in smaller quantity and finally UI tests should be written in the smallest quantity.
Now discussing about Automation Frameworks, there are many of them and each one has it’s pros and cons, here we’ll just mention some of them:
It’s important for the QA Engineer to know how to work with more than one framework because it’s possible that more than one is needed on a project, also they must know which framework adapts better to the projects needs.
Also it’s important that the QA Engineer has basic knowledge on CI / CD Frameworks even though that advanced expertise is not needed because that’s not their main responsibility, QA Engineer should know how to identify if there’s any automated implementation issue due to configuration problems or which automated tests need to be coded or fixed to comply with the frameworks requirements.
This automation knowledge allows the QA Engineer to provide added value to their work and even when sometimes it might look like busy work, automation can make the QA’s work a lot easier.
