Which approach should be applied when automating stories? What are the approaches or methodologies for it?

Question

Here is what approach means to me while automating any story

1. Normal approach should we automate only functional flow not caring about the UI things like font of text, font type of text, color of text, background color, images, different panels on page etc.

2. Strict approach automate each and every thing which is mentioned in test-plan including images, text styling, colors etc.. etc.. things.(of course this one is time consuming process.)

which one is better?

Any other standard industry methodologies there about how and what to automate from one test-plan. please shed light on this I did not find any good guide on internet about this.

Answer 1

Normal approach should we automate only functional flow not caring about the UI things like font of text, font type of text, color of text, background color, images, different panels on page etc.

In short, DO NOT DO THIS. Automating text/fonts/images is a terrible idea because they can change. Does your marketing team (if you have one) have access to the markup for your page? Can they make changes to the page on-demand? You must understand that automated tests, in general, are dumb. If a test cannot find something, it will fail. For example, you are testing this sentence on your page: "Hi, welcome to our website!", and your automated test looks something like this (example in Selenium pseudo-code):

driver.FindElement(By.LinkText(@"Hi, welcome to our Website!"));

That line above will fail. Do you see why? Someone spelled the word, "Website" with the 'W' in capitals, and the text on the website is lower-cased.

Strict approach automate each and every thing which is mentioned in test-plan including images, text styling, colors etc.. etc.. things.(of course this one is time consuming process.)

Ultimately, it's up to you and your team which approach to take (I prefer C#/Selenium), and to test only the objects on the page that an end-user would interact with, like a dropdown or textbox or button. This will make your tests far more robust because, you are testing something that is more 'constant'. I wish you the best!

Answer 2

According to your given two above approaches, you should adopt the Normal approach. That's the major part which can be automated! And shouldn't worry about

the UI things like font of text, font type of text, color of text, background color, images, different panels on page etc

Wasting time to automate these would be suicidal considering these are less important, changing frequently and could easily be checked manually rather!

If you really want to automate these then it should be the least priority! Also mentioning my observation-"Never stick to any Strict approach neither for automation nor manual testing." There are many constrains, limitation and scope always.

Answer 3

As per my experience in our automation testing company we should not try to automate the UI features in the story e.g, alignment, color etc. It would be waste of time. Instead we should focus to generate functionality test cases from story that exercise the application logic and that can be part of sanity or regression suite.

In this way automation is adding value to overall release cycle.