Agile automated testing is particularly important in the lifecycle of a project utilizing the agile development methodology. Agile software development involves a constant feedback loop among team members. This is in contrast to the waterfall style of development where software testing only begins once the development phase has been completed. In agile development, software testing activities are conducted from the beginning of the project. Software testing is done incrementally and iteratively.

Automated testing is an extremely important part of agile testing. After each change in the system, it is important to run a battery of automated functional and regression tests to ensure that no new defects have been introduced. Without this automated testing harness, agile testing can become very time consuming and this can result in insufficient test coverage. This will in turn affect software quality. Automated testing is necessary for the project to maintain agility. As a matter of fact, introducing automated processes such as automated builds and automated smoke tests is important in all aspects of agile development. As budgets shrink, time spent on repeatable automated testing becomes more and more necessary.

Many automated testing tools in the market don’t focus enough on being resistant to user interface changes making them difficult to utilize in an agile environment. Automated testing tools should be designed so that test automation scripts are very resistant to user interface changes. Otherwise, agile automated testing teams will spend too much ensuring that their scripts don’t break rather than focusing on automating important use cases. This can result in a scenario where automated testing becomes more of a liability than an asset.

Automated testing is most effective when it is conducted throughout the project lifecycle rather than exclusively in the later stages of the project. Defects found early on are less expensive and take less time to fix than the same defects discovered in a more advanced stage of the project. Moreover, there are cases when the only way of handling an important defect is through system design modifications. It is clearly much easier to handle such defects in an early phase of the project rather than in a later stage.