How do you incorporate automation into planning?

Community Discussion Automation Test
#1

Hi there.
We’ve recently undergone a bit of an Agile transformation, up-ing our agile game! Part of this involved a lot more planning and preparing tickets before bringing into sprint.
We’ve also improved our QA scenario planning. We now have a separate Testing section on all Jira tickets where we have bullet pointed test scenarios that the whole team is aware of (helping the whole team test better). However these still tend to focus on the manual tests that QA will do.
The next step we are busy trialing is putting these test scenarios into a table format, and having columns stating whether the test will be:
• Automated (new test, update existing test or no automation)
• Test Type (unit, UI or manual)
• Who will do the testing (dev or QA)
We’re still working out the kinks but so far it seems to be helping.
I was wondering:

  1. How does everyone else go about about planning automation and manual testing?
  2. How do you decide if something should be automated or done manually?
#2

we are kind of going through the same right now… So here some thoughts😉

One metric is the ROI. How many times can I execute this test manually until the investment of automating it pays off ?

I would also look at the business value of the features you are testing. Automate first where there is a high business value.

Change impact - automate first for features of the application which are often changing or often impacted by changes. This is however is a double edged sword, because it could also mean that your test also has to change quite often😉

Also I would keep in mind that some tests are not meant to be automated. For instance if you are interested in testing the user experience you would want to test that manually.