Benefits of E2E Test Automation & Continuous Testing (Part 3: to Business Analysts)

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Updated (2023–09–28): My Innovative Solution to Continuous Testing: Let Business Analysts Self-help Create Data in a BuildWise CT Server

Continuous Testing (enables software teams to release to production daily, not fake CI/CD talks. Check out “Continuous Integration at Facebook” and AgileWay Continuous Testing Grading) is the centre of the software development process. It benefits all stakeholders of a software project.

• Executives
• Managers
• Business Analysts (BAs)
• Developers
• Testers (automated & manual)
• Customers

Many people do not realize that business analysts (BA) can also benefit significantly from CT. Surprised? It is actually very logical: BAs use the application (via UI) a lot (maybe only behind manual testers). As a matter of fact, after contracting/consulting for over 10+ years, I have come to notice that BAs are often among the first ones to realize the great benefits of E2E test automation and CT.

The benefits for BAs are:

• Test Data Creation
• Quick navigation to the application
• Self-help test data generation or an individual automation script run
• Performing a sequence of business steps

1. Test data creation

Typically, a BA frequently wants to get a particular data scenario in the application. To achieve that, they spend a lot of time using the application. It is not efficient: slow and error-prone.

I once worked on an insurance claim application. Lodging a proper claim (with many different categories) could easily take 4 minutes even if every step was done correctly. After seeing that, I created a suite of automated scripts (in Selenium Ruby) to get newly lodged claim numbers for a few sets of scenarios, of which each took 40 seconds on average.