What is your biggest pain point when it comes to automation testing?

My biggest pain point in automation testing is the constant need to maintain and update test scripts. As the application evolves with new features and UI changes, the tests become brittle and break frequently.

This requires significant effort to identify the broken tests, understand the changes in the application, and then modify the scripts accordingly.

This ongoing maintenance can be time-consuming and resource-intensive, often overshadowing the initial benefits of automation.

Ignorance and Misunderstanding by management of the purpose and process of "automation", This causes them to make decisions based on criteria that lead to low ROI. Then they do what all management do which is blame the testers/developers for failing to implement correctly. Managing leadership expectations is a far underutilised skill, and training generally focuses on "hard" skills such as language or framework knowledge rather than soft skills. Ironically, and contrary to the physical world, good automation stands stronger on a foundation of soft rather than hard skills.

Biggest challange I face is maintanance of script. Too many changes on UI/UX, unstale code by developers.

Also, limited resources. I am the only person who is doing all things for multiple projects at once and trying to manage all. I always miss something or else due to this.

The hardest thing is maintaining test automation so that the locators are targeting the correct thing.  About 5% of the test suite ends up failing even though no UI has changed in the app we are testing.

As per my opinion, below are few pain points of automation testing:

• Environment Stability: Ensuring that the test environment mirrors the production environment and is stable can be an ongoing challenge.
• Maintenance Overhead: As the application evolves, test scripts often require frequent updates. This can become quite labor-intensive, especially if the test suite is extensive.
• Flaky Tests: Intermittent test failures due to timing issues or dependencies on external systems can be a major frustration, as they undermine confidence in the test results.
• Changes in Requirements: Rapid changes in project requirements can lead to instability and require continuous updates to the test scripts, making it challenging to maintain a robust test automation framework.

Thank you everyone for your answers and contributions.

We’re happy to announce that the winner of this competition is ​@hrdave. I’ve already gotten in touch with him over the email to arrange his prize.

Congratulations to you ​@hrdave  and better luck next time for everyone else. Thank you!

Thank you ​@Mustafa and Tricentis for organizing such thoughtful webinar. It was truly awesome and insightful. I am glad to be part of such community. Thanks once again for wonderful gift and look forward to participate more in near future. 

Hello ​@Mukesh_Otwani ,

From my experience, developers often finish tickets on the last day of the sprint, which makes it extremely hectic to cover all scenarios within the limited time.

In my opinion, they need to prioritize tasks accordingly based on the story points.

Cheers,

Ramanan