For every sprint there should be a conversation that confirms which tests will be written at what level that the whole team agrees to and the tests are not duplicated in the framework.

Another reason the test automation becomes a big ball of mess is because teams never get into the “Stop the Line” mindset when a test fails. Without this culture, more tests get put into an “ignored” state and or are just plain ignored. This accrues debt as team members have to spend time analyzing these failed tests instead of fixing tests or fixing code. I have seen instances where a test automation run takes two weeks to analyze all the failures. In that case just throw out the tests and start over. If your automation is in this state today you can first move all your “unstable” tests out of your regression run and put them in their own automation run. Then negotiate with the business time to re-factor those tests, if you find that they still have value. The goal at the end of this is that once you put focus to get these tests “passing” the team moves to a culture that if the test fails you stop everything and fix it. Second option is to throw them out completely, which from my experience is just an equal option.

Lastly and the main reason tests become inefficient is that we don’t spend time in refactoring them. Tests like code can become brittle, obsolete, slow, and not valuable. You should put effort in quarterly to review your slowest test steps, slowest tests cases, and slowest test suites. Spend time refactoring them to speed them up or delete the tests, yes, I just said delete the tests. If a test has never failed in five years of running then maybe it is not a good test. Spend time reviewing the tests that have never failed, make sure that they are good tests, or maybe see if this test is duplicated at a lower level of automation therefore being found before your test runs.

Maintaining the test automation strategy has been one of the biggest challenges to date in agile software development. This is mainly due to the fact that most frameworks are maintained by a few people and those people leave after a few years. They attributed their leaving was due to “maintaining” old tests versus “creating” new tests. One team member even went on to say he was on the maintenance team as the test automation was so complex and robust that the only thing to do was to maintain them and modify a few scenarios here and there when new functionality was being added.

Here is where the cyclical problem occurs and why your test automation can get out of control. When a new team member comes on-board if we don’t review the automation strategy, we don’t train them on the framework, we don’t focus on the importance of the tests passing, we don’t emphasize the importance of refactoring their tests, we end up in this big ball of mess. What’s interesting is that we usually will put that level of diligence of onboarding for our production code. Just imagine if we treated our test code to the same level of craftsmanship as our production code how we might never have gotten in this mess in the first place?

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