Test Automation: The holy grail. The holy sh!7 – how much. The wholly confused.

For those mature test organisations/functions, you’ll probably be cringing at this, and thinking as to why organisations aren’t baking this into the development lifecycle by now.

The truth is: the mature ones are the minority.

I have read many stats (mainly from tools vendors!) about the huge take up of test automation and associated tooling, and the integration across the full development lifecycle – up to as much as 78% (ref: The QA Lead). However, for many organisations, there are generally a few pockets of success, mainly frustrations and a real sense of failure to adopt it effectively.

My guess is that sub-7 % of technology functions are leveraging test automation as effectively for their business as they could.

There are many common threads that we see. As a business this helps, it means that we can quickly get to understand the decision points that got them there. It also helps that we can often provide an immediate sticking plaster or longer-term, more strategic solutions/options.

It would be extremely difficult to summarise all our thoughts/findings within a single document, but as a way of giving back to the community, we are launching a four-month campaign on the very subject, to help organisations figure out the best approach for them. In summary, we will look at:

• What success looks like and examples of how you get there

• Experts’ views across several industry perspectives, through our webinar series

• What success looks like from a people/skills perspective; from Architects to newly qualified Test Engineers

• What the future holds for test engineering and test automation

We believe that the content that we share can support many organisations at all levels within technology and business teams.  We’ll be aiming content at the:

• CIO/CFO: and how to drive organisational efficiency and accelerate business case realisation

• Head of Test/Product/Dev: how to maximise the effectiveness of your team through tooling, techniques, and accelerators

• Dev/Test Teams: the techniques (low and high level) for success, the journey of peers and ideas for you make a mark in your organisation

We truly hope that you find the content valuable.

Stephen Johnson – CEO & Founder, ROQ