Failure of traditional test automation is usually corresponding to the automation coverage percentages of every bank or organization proving that test coverage is a top challenge for the teams needed to be reevaluated. Getting to know the five most common reasons of test automation failure, will help you re-build your test automation strategy in the most successful way:

High maintenance of traditional script-based tests

With traditional automation, testers have to invest considerable time into learning how to script each test scenario. Script-based tests will need to be maintained and updated. Over time, as new features and new product improvements are introduced, the test cases and regression suites will grow as well, making it difficult to ensure that these are up-to-date and reusable. Every time there is a change or update in the application, your tests must be updated so that they could re-run successfully.

To make things worse, scripts become as vulnerable to defects as code is. This means that when we have defects in our test scripts, it causes false positives and can interrupt test execution. The combination of false positives, script errors and bloated test suites create burdens for the QA teams that cannot be easily overcome.

Software architectures have changed

Today’s application complexity has increased fast, and test automation fails to uncover its full potentials because of limitations with existing automation tools and techniques, most of which originate from 30-year-old methodologies. Software architectures have changed dramatically over time, and the use of modern technologies has also grown immensely. Testing has also grown in complexity.

It now needs to support multiple new applications built on disparate technologies. This means that, at any point testing teams need to be able to test APIs, regressions, the performance and UIs on various operating systems and devices.

Traditional outdated testing tools and processes do not support Agile and DevOps and were architected for months-long release schedules and simply don’t fit in the digital world, which requires immediate quality feedback with each new build.

Unrealistic Expectations

Development teams tend to believe that test automation is a one-size-fits-all solution, and this is the most common reason why test automation fails. Developers, who may not be used to thinking like testers, are sold on test automation with unrealistic expectations. Test Automations depends on various parameters like requirements, the type of tests, and the number of tests that need to be automated. So, one will need to be patient and willing to grow along with continuous improvement for automated testing to work efficiently.

Lack of sufficient time

Even with today’s Agile methodology, larger requirements delay the start of testing and need to be broken down to create a minimum viable product ready for early testing. Active testing of user stories happens most of the times in the last few days of the sprint. Following steps to have the product ready before testing starts is essential for a healthy and as-fast-as possible automated testing process.

Lack of technical skills

Flacky tests are the result of a team that isn’t trained enough to provide stable, repeatable tests that ensures a good flow on the testing process. Poor object locaters used in the code and the difficulty of handling varying page load times create tests that pass and fail periodically without any code changes. Skill gap can be bridged though with the scripted tools used for test automation.

Frequent changes

Adding new features to the product leads to continuous refactoring of the automation base code. Management usually ignores the time needed to rebuild robust tests and thus constant requested changes on the product introduce a higher technical debt.

Poor design/ Automating useless tests

In most cases, people are automating every “test” just for the sake of it, without considering the integration points or potential failure points. So what should be automated? A risk-based approach in automation will ensure that operational and business risks are identified and prioritized to ensure the issues are fully addressed. It enables you to assess the aggregated risk coverage from business, technical, performance and compliance perspectives for your automated software testing needs. Traditional approaches leave blind spots behind, leaving up to 35% of the functionality untested.

It is important to move away from siloed traditional manual testing processes, and get on the path of Agile test automation. With the adoption of test automation, you will be able to find and fix more bugs before go-live while also reducing the time it takes to get new products to the market.