Sure! Happy to help…
In my personal experience, many automation projects have failed to meet the expectations of managers, stakeholders, or team members due to the amount of hours and effort invested at the beginning and the lack of clear goals throughout the automation lifecycle. For example, starting automation without clear objectives—such as the number of test cases to automate per cycle, the hours dedicated to automation, and the expected completion date for test cases—can lead to issues.
As I often emphasize in the training courses I provide, test automation should be a formal activity within the Testing Lifecycle. It should not be treated as a task to do in your spare time. Test automation projects should have a plan, a defined scope, and clear goals. I recommend using the S.M.A.R.T. approach for goal definition.
Based on these goals and plans, testers should analyze and select which test cases needs to be automated. Automating everything is not feasible, and some test cases are not worth automating. Create a list of feasible test cases to automate, track their progress, once you finish, mark them as completed, and share them with colleagues, etc. Make those test cases a live asset in your project.
Once you have a considerable number of test cases and the System Under Test (SUT) undergoes continuous changes, test cases maintenance and updates will be necessary. Consider how to refactor these test cases for upcoming changes to minimize future work and effort. Use parameters, variables, create reusable scripts, and leave comments for your future self.
Regularly track the status of the test cases and compare them with your initial plan. How many test cases have been implemented so far? What about the schedule? What is the status of my defined goals? These questions will help you understand the state of your automation project and guide decision-making. For example, you might need to speed up test case authoring, reduce the time and effort spent on maintaining test cases, or postpone some test cases.
As you can see, I am not discussing the technical aspects of automation because those skills are generally easier to acquire compared to the strategic considerations mentioned above. There is a wealth of information, tutorials, and training on how to use automation tools. For example, in the Katalon ecosystem, we have Katalon Academy, Katalon Docs, forums, YouTube channels, etc. However, there is less information on how to implement a well-defined automation project or how to start automating in a real long-term project.
In regard to your initial questions, I began my journey in test automation without any of this advice, so you can imagine that my first projects were the opposite of what I describe above: no plan, no scope and leaving automation for spare time (which I never had). Over the years, these have been valuable lessons learned for me.
I hope this helps new automation testers.