When is the best time to create automated test cases?

Question

When is the best time to write automated test cases? I understand that automated test cases are written in parallel or else by Test Driven Development.

But when should automated functional or regression test cases be written?

I am asking this question so that I may hire my automation team resources accordingly.

I assume that when the system will be somewhat ready after 2-3 releases, then I will hire automation testers.

Answer 1

An Agile team should have automation testing knowledge from the start, the team should be cross-functional. Personally I think a test in each layer of the test pyramid should be defined in the definition of done for each story (feature) that is done.

Creating UI tests as an after thought will result in harder testable software. During development it is easy and cheap to change the UI a bit to make it testable from the start. Don't have testers struggle months after the development is done.

Make sure you write a couple of UI tests each iteration. This will make it easier to write end-2-end test for new functionality and defects in a later stage, certainly for defects that are hard to test in unit-tests.

Also your automation testers will not have the domain knowledge to write good tests, because they will join the project later and did not grow with the product.

Keep a good balance between UI and Unit-tests, UI tests are harder to maintain and with a constant changing UI it might even get frustrating to update them. Make sure UI tests are written as maintainable as possible, have the team use patterns like PageObjects.

Other reads:

• Less topic about not seperating testing: http://less.works/less/technical-excellence/thinking-about-testing.html#ThinkingAboutTesting

Answer 2

The sooner the better ROI :) Start automating as soon as application is getting developed and deployed by Sprint2. But do not start automating the test cases if your System/application is not stable otherwise you will end up correcting the scripts and spend time & money on correcting the same. I will say start targetting Framework, project structure and flow that helps you automate tests by Sprint2.

Use these top tips to ensure that your software testing is successful and you get the maximum return on investment (ROI):

• Decide what Test Cases to Automate
• Test Early and Test Often
• Select the Right Automated Testing Tool
• Divide your Automated Testing Efforts
• Create Good, Quality Test Data
• Create Automated Tests that are Resistant to Changes in the UI

At the same time, you can get the most benefit out of your automated testing efforts by automating:

• Repetitive tests that run for multiple builds.
• Tests that tend to cause human error.
• Tests that require multiple data sets.
• Frequently used functionality that introduces high risk conditions.
• Tests that are impossible to perform manually.
• Tests that run on several different hardware or software platforms and configurations.
• Tests that take a lot of effort and time when manual testing.