If you are building a technology platform for a large enterprise, having one option for a particular technology stack for all the teams in the organization may not be a good solution. In my previous posts, I have mentioned about 360 Automation platform. There were some questions I have received around it.
Does that mean we ask everyone in the organization to use one single tool?
What if one tool doesn’t work for all the use-cases in the organization?
360 Automation doesn’t limit people in your organization to use one single toolset. It means you build a platform through which all the tools in your organization can integrate with each other and work in a unified model. The platform can have multiple tools for the same purpose. In fact, the recommendation would be to have at least two tools for each purpose in the platform.
Let’s take some examples to elaborate.
Mobile Automation – You may have Appium as your primary tool. But you may run into situations where Appium may not be able to address some of iOS use cases. There may be other tools like XCTest, which may be able to automate those. If you only have Appium as mobile automation solution in 360 Automation Platform, your team may run into challenges due to the limitation of the tool, when there may be other tools in the industry, which can automate. Having a second option will help to overcome such challenges and help the teams to have alternate options. If your organization wants to adopt the “Automation First” approach, having alternatives will assist to achieve high automation coverage.
Cloud Farm – You may have one device farm vendor for execution in the cloud. But if you are managing the automation platform for an organization, you will realize no one platform comes with all possible features. Also, the cost of running each and every test in a SaaS-based cloud farm is highly expensive.
It would be a good idea to consider a hybrid strategy there. Having one device farm as your primary and another in-house cloud farm as an alternative. An in-house cloud farm would help you to implement the custom solution, where the SaaS provider may not have an out of box solution. At the same time will help you to optimize your test infrastructure cost. You can explore options like DAKube
Thus by adopting multiple options and having a hybrid strategy in each area of operations, you would be able to increase automation coverage and also take care of other factors e.g. cost. But it would be key to have all these solutions work as a homogenous unit through a 360 Automation platform. The features need to be built out in a way so that teams should be able to switch between these options by changing configuration parameters easily.
360 Automation platform – A platform that plans – executes and reports in a unified way!