Automation Testing Roles and Responsibilities

Definition of Automation Testing Roles and Responsibilities

Automation testing roles and responsibilities are defined as understanding one’s position in the team and the corresponding tasks and duties that needs to be fulfilled to justify the role a person is attending to. Employees who join an organization are held accountable for the tasks and duties referred to as responsibilities for the assigned role or the position in the team. With having a clear chalked out responsibilities for the designated automation testing role, one would be able to have a tangible and non-tangible benefit for the smoother execution and leading to more productive outcomes for the organization. One needs to have a clear understanding of the responsibilities for the role so that it provides a positive impact on one’s career and also for betterment of the organization. In this article we will go through the various responsibilities for automation testing roles!

Roles and Responsibilities in Automation Testing

In today’s world of software and IT jobs, development of software is the one of the most crucial tasks in order to bring the features needed by the users in the software. The other crucial part is for testing engineers to work closely and more importantly “Efficiently” specially for automation testing engineers, in order to smoothen and improve the quality of the feature. Assume a feature to be live in the website with a lot of bugs and glitches. This might lead to decrease in the footfall of the website hence leading to lesser popularity and may be implying lesser revenue generation. With the intervention of a testing engineer these bugs and glitches can be caught early and hence lead to near to bug free software for users to consume. For understanding why testing engineer has to work efficiently, assume that there are lot of features which needs to be tested. Some of the features can be tested by just getting a 200 OK response and supposedly there are 100s of APIs that needs to be tested. Here, manually it might take days to complete it might require one to hit the API wait for the response and note down in an excel about the response status. Now, if this job can be done by just a “for” loop which will execute all these APIs and consecutively note down the status against each. Won’t that be efficient working!

The efficient working is one of the things that lead to implying the responsibilities of the role of automation testing! In the next paragraph we will go through the responsibilities of an automation test engineer and go into depth to get full fledged and clear implication of the responsibilities. The responsibilities are broadly classified into 5 categories and with them there are sub-responsibilities which in a complete sense fulfills the responsibilities of an automation testing engineer.

• Requirement: This step is focused into understanding the needs of the features that goes into the development along with the demand that needs to be fulfilled. With the fusion of both is when the following responsibilities are chosen.
  • Interaction with clients or stakeholders: As a primary responsibility the tester should interact with stakeholders on a regular basis so that the features and the demands are well understood and properly signed-off before starting to work on it and later find discrepancy.
  • Participation in setup of the automation setup: As per the requirements, tester must be part of the setup so that particular needs of the test environment is looked after and installed.
• Design: This step includes responsibilities which caters to the development of the various use cases to test the required specifications as per the requirement.
  • Identify the test cases: Here the responsibility of the automation tester is identifying the test cases which would take care of looking into features from a fresh angle so that there is no developer’s dependence.
  • Creation of test plans: After the test cases have been identified, test plans needs to be created and documented prudently so that while implementation it becomes an easier reference during implementation.
  • Configuring the software testing estimations: This is an important responsibility to manage the activities in order to have a rough estimate of time that would be required for testing
• Implementation: This is the step when automation testers starts developing the test cases that are written and designed in the earlier category of the responsibility. The responsibility in this category are:
  • Applying the designs: With the tests written as a part of creating the test plans, here one would need to apply and start developing those designs into automated test cases.
  • Exact solutions to the problem: As another responsibility under this category, during the development of algorithms to find the exact solution to the problem one would also need to take care of identity of objects and proper handling of errors.
  • Implementing as per project structure: As the designs are applied and exact solution to the problem is developed the project structure needs to be kept in mind to maintain the project structure
• Testing: This is by far the most critical step as the results of this step determines whether the feature tested passes the exam which is thrown at it. This step is one of the important milestones in a Software Development Lifecycle. The responsibilities under this category are:
  • Running the test cases: As a part of responsibility, the test cases written above needs to be executed to understand the result of the same and enhance or debug the test cases if required.
  • Change management: If any changes to the test cases are required it needs to be properly managed and run the regression test cases.
  • Collation of the process: Once the test cases are run, one would need to collate and monitor the defect management process.
• Maintenance: The final step is all about keeping the development made above and keep maintaining.

Conclusion

In this article we tried to understand responsibilities that needs to be fulfilled in order to justify role of automation testing by running the test cases that are developed in an automatised way for an efficient validation of the feature that is developed and needs to be launched!

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