BusStopMaintenance of Automated Processes - Why It Matters
The majority of teams begin their automation journey with enthusiasm in creating scripts and running them successfully to see the results quickly. However, after a period of a few months, things start to fall apart. Tests that passed before will fail for unclear reasons. Eventually, the team starts to lose trust in the results.
This is where most automation efforts break, not because the tools were poor but because maintenance was never planned. In this blog, we will explore the importance of maintaining automated processes with a real-world example.
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Why Maintenance Isn’t Optional
Think of automation like owning a car. You cannot just buy the car and drive for the rest of your life. You need to fill up the gas tank, check the oil, monitor the engine, and more. The same goes for automated tests - they require maintenance to ensure they stay reliable.
When test suites are not maintained properly,
- Tests fail randomly, even when the product is in working condition
- Debugging false failures takes up valuable time
- Testers will hesitate to use the scripts
- Teams will start to lose confidence in automation
Good automation is not about how many scripts you create; it is all about how many work six months down the road.
Common Triggers for Maintenance
Most of the time, tests may fail due to minor but significant changes in the system, rather than bad scripts. Some common issues may include:
- API updates: Fields, endpoints, or response structure
- UI updates: Names or labels of elements or objects
- Test data changes: Outdated values or conditions missing
- Environment differences: Tests pass on staging environment, but fail on production
- Updates in tools or libraries, like moving to a new version
You cannot control changes, but you can be prepared for them with a defined plan for maintenance.
A Day in the Life of a Broken Test Suite
Imagine a tester has automated 40 API tests for a sprint. Everything was fine until the backend team added a new field to an API response and changed a few keys in the response.
Whenever they ran the tests again, half of them failed. The tester assumed that it was a regression bug, but the developers reassured that it was just a “small update.” The real issue was not the scripts, but zero maintenance and missed API changes.
That failure would have been avoided if the team had a standard process for tracking API changes or at least a mapping for test cases to the endpoints of the API.
How to Make Maintenance Easier
Given below are some simple ways to minimize the complexity of maintenance:
1. Have a unique ID for each test, which can be tracked and also linked to the feature or API to be tested.
2. Separate test data from the logic by keeping them in external files (eg. CSV or JSON) instead of hardcoding them.
3. Use version control like Git to track when changes are made and provide a meaningful commit message explaining what changed and why.
4. Dedicate some time to maintenance to check for broken tests, clean up outdated scripts, and review the test coverage.
5. Assign every module/feature to a test owner who is responsible for the maintenance and updates of that script.
Why Maintenance Builds Confidence
While it might feel like saving time by not spending much on maintenance, you are simply building chaos for the future. Tests that are not maintained generate false failures, increase release times, and reduce confidence in the results of your automation.
On the other hand, well-maintained tests allow the team to confidently release faster. They provide accurate feedback, and they act as a safety net for testing with every product update.
Conclusion
Even though automation maintenance may not give any excitement, it is the thing that keeps your system running well. When your tests are consistent, easy to follow, and connect to real features, automation becomes an ally instead of a burden. The goal is not to automate everything, but to ensure that what is automated always works, when it really matters.
And when you do use the right tools like BusStop, maintenance becomes less about efforts and more about ensuring your automation is still working and awesome!!
