As I’m finding myself, I’ve been writing about QA Test Automation quite extensively in the years around 2010. No surprise – it was my main specialty. Then I was extending and sharpening my skillset in the field of QA Testing, and writing more and more about my new interests. Yet it wasn’t a transition – I’m still the sharpest ever automation craftsman capable to create a large-scale test automation that meets business and process objectives.

The difference is that I’m now usually both above and within the process – providing technical guidance for the team and making hands-on contribution for the most challenging pieces. And sometimes now I combine both roles of QA Lead and Automation Lead, which made me looking somewhat differently at the same automation requirements I had defined.

The new angle is about the context. By now, quite too often I’ve seen projects where technically right solutions cannot be implemented due to a range of reasons – from political complications to time, budget, or skill constraints. So I took the good old Usability (part 1 and part 2), Robustness, Scalability, and Maintainability requirements, reprioritized and reworked them into a new fashion.

Here’s how the new revision looks.

• Business Value – purpose, utilization, creation cost, and expected benefit.
• Reliability – how well test automation must perform to provide the Business Value.
• Maintainability – how little (or how much) it would cost to keep the automation working in order to receive the Business Value.
• Scalability – how well can automated testing solution be expanded with more test cases and scripts, and how it will affect Reliability and Maintainability.

The next series of posts provide details for each category.