5 Ways to Accelerate With Shift-Left in Test Automation
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Shift-left gives a direction, but there are still many options.
Upstream activities along the software lifecycle can benefit from test automation to accelerate the quality and speed of delivery.
An additional benefit is to better identify test automation requirements by design, facilitating the implementation and maintenance of automated tests.
This article shares 5 practical ways to start with Shift-left in test automation, keeping in mind the objective to accelerate valuable software delivery.
Follow Cerberus Testing for more open-source test automation.
Identify customer journeys for test automation
Digital experiences start with customer journeys, a method that enables to map the main paths taken by users while interacting with a software solution.
Customer journeys are powerful in the shared visibility and focus they bring to teams that have a tendency to lose sight of users, working on their local priorities.
It’s equally a benefit for test automation. Knowing which customer journeys are more critical, used and changed give valuable inputs for test automation prioritization.
Ensuring a continuous link between customer journeys and automated tests will drastically help the entire team to accelerate their software delivery.
Improve user stories with BDD scenarios
User stories clarify the required behavior of features cascading from customer journeys. They are essential in agile methodologies, but can lack alignment during implementation.
Apply Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) to user stories enrich them with more precise scenarios, examples and acceptance criteria.
This data allows us to streamline the implementation of automated tests that can directly use the defined data to build better automated tests.
Additionally, robust user requirements and scenarios are essential to design tests are more decoupled, easier to implement and maintain with modularity.
