Most organizations understand that test automation is essential for modern application delivery processes. They’re just not sure how to make it a reality in an enterprise environment without exorbitant overhead and massive disruption. Enterprise organizations typically achieve small victories, but the process ultimately decays due to challenges in five main areas. Understanding these challenges will help us overcome them.

Testing continuous technological change can seem like chaos. There are many challenges that need to be managed, such as unavailability of power, excessive temperature, incorrect configuration, unexpected behavior of services, network downtime, and processing slowdown in production. By deliberately engineering chaos, we’ll be able to discover many of our systems’ weaknesses before our users do.

Traditional GUI automation is linear; it follows a set of steps. The first time you run it, it can't add any value, as the feature isn't done until the automation runs. Once test automation runs a second time, it effectively becomes change detection. This leads to a large number of "failures" that are not actually failures. Whether they are false positives or false negatives, we need a way to fix the automation tooling.

After finding and reporting a bug, a tester may get this response from a developer: "Please rerun the test on the latest version of the code and check if the bug still reproduces." This seems like a rational request; just as a change can cause a bug to appear, it can also fix a bug. But is following up the responsibility of the tester or the developer? And if the bug is no longer there, how do you classify and close it?