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How to Build a Test Automation Techstack?

How to build a test automation techstack? Here's a quick guide for you.

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Smart Summary

Building a robust test automation tech stack can be complex, involving numerous decisions from tool selection to integration. Our guide simplifies this process by outlining essential considerations for defining goals, selecting the right tools, integrating with CI/CD pipelines, and managing test activities effectively to ensure a successful automation journey.

  • Define Clear Automation Goals: Before tool selection, clarify your specific testing needs—such as UI, API, performance, or security—alongside development team languages, CI/CD pipeline details, application types (web, mobile, desktop), and team skill levels. This ensures choosing a solution that truly fits your unique organizational context.
  • Strategically Choose Your Test Automation Tools: Decide whether to build a custom framework for unique intellectual property, offering greater control but requiring significant resources, or buy an off-the-shelf solution for faster deployment and vendor-managed maintenance. Consider a hybrid approach to balance specialized needs with general testing efficiency.
  • Integrate Test Management and CI/CD Seamlessly: Select test solutions that provide robust test case, data, and reporting management capabilities to unify your entire testing flow. Ensure the chosen solution integrates effortlessly with existing CI/CD pipelines, supporting automated triggers, parallel execution, and efficient reporting to streamline your release process.
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How to Build a Test Automation Techstack?

How to Build a Test Automation Techstack?

Vincent N.
Vincent N.
QA Consultant Updated on

Embarking on the test automation journey can be exciting, and daunting, at the same time.

It's exciting, because we all know how test automation translates into faster releases, fewer bugs, and most importantly, more bandwidth for QA teams to perform higher-value exploratory tests.

It's daunting, because building a test automation tech-stack is full of unknowns:

  • What tools should we use?
  • Who writes and maintains the tests?
  • How to build a CI/CD pipeline?
  • How to maintain the automation tests?

We wrote this article to answer those questions for you and simplify the process of embracing test automation.

1. Define your goals

Before choosing tools, clarify:

  • What types of testing do you need? (UI, API, performance, security, etc.)

  • What languages does your dev team use?

  • What's your CI/CD pipeline?

  • Do you test web, mobile, or desktop apps?

  • What's your team’s skill level?

Ultimately, it is not about choosing the best. It is about choosing a tool that fits.

2. Choose your framework/tools

Once you have worked out the test automation goals, decide whether you should build a test automation framework or buy a test automation tool.

Generally speaking:

  • Build — if it is something that distinguishes your company in the market or advances the intellectual property of the company

  • Buy — if it is a Line-Of-Business application that is readily available in the market

In this context of QA, both options is possible, depending on the context of your business.

If you go with the Build route, you have a wide range of test automation frameworks to choose from, including Selenium, Cypress, or Playwright.

  • Pros: You have more control over the framework architecture.
  • Cons: It needs a team of architects and devs to build and continuously maintain the framework. There is longer ramp-up time before actual test automation.

If you go with the Buy route, you can browse through the automation testing tools available on the market to find one that fits your team's specific needs.

  • Pros: You have access to powerful out-of-the-box test features, so anyone can start testing immediately. Product maintenance is shouldered by the vendor. Minimal setup time leads to faster time-to-value.
  • Cons: Less options for customization compared to a home-made framework, and the company may have to rely on the vendor for support.

The final decision to choose between buy or build rests upon the QA team’s available resources, expertise, as well as the complexity of infrastructure. They may choose a hybrid option: building a testing solution for sensitive, critical components while buying a solution for other testing needs.

Read More: Katalon vs Selenium: A Comparison Between Buy vs Build 

3. Choose your CI/CD tools

Automation testing opens up the capabilities for CI/CD pipeline integration, so this is an aspect that you must consider.

Regardless of whether you chose the Build or Buy route, make sure that the final solution seamlessly fit into your arsenal of CI/CD tools.  

Your test solution should:

  • Plug directly into tools like Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI, or Azure DevOps

  • Support automated triggers, parallel execution, and reporting pipelines

  • Fit into your release process without requiring extensive custom workarounds

4. Consider test management capabilities

Test management is the glue that holds the entire testing flow together. Within test management, you have three major activities:

  1. Test case management
  2. Test data management
  3. Test reporting

For test case management, many QA teams leverage a spreadsheet with a test case template. More dedicated teams go with XRay, or Katalon TestOps, which is a more dedicated solution. Test creation and execution is synced with a test management dashboard to make the entire process more streamlined.

Similarly, for test data management and test reporting, many QA teams also leverage Google Sheets to manage their data files, or choose a tool with these capabilities built in.

Katalon TestOps dashboard

Katalon as your full-stack test automation solution

Katalon logo

Katalon accompanies your QA team throughout the entire software testing life cycle.

With Katalon, you can write tests in 3 modes (no-code, low-code, full-code), manage tests in a centralized dashboard, schedule test runs, execute tests across environments, and generate detailed reports.

And all of that can be done for web testing, API testing, and mobile application testing. In other words, Katalon is a centralized platform for all of your testing activities.

Feature highlights:

  • Suitable for any testing needs, from individual testers, QA teams, to large enterprises
  • No-code, low-code, and full-code scripting in Groovy
  • Automatic test maintenance
  • Support web, mobile, API testing. Packaged app testing also available.
  • Run tests across local machine, cloud, on-premise environments, with easy CI/CD integrations
  • AI-powered regression testing with TrueTest
  • Data-driven testing and BDD testing supported
  • Diverse integration ecosystem with ALM and CI/CD tools
  • Detailed reports with analytics, screenshots, videos, HTML Snapshot, and Test Suite report email

Website: Katalon
Price: Free and flexible paid plans
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Vincent N.
Vincent N.
QA Consultant
Vincent Nguyen is a QA consultant with in-depth domain knowledge in QA, software testing, and DevOps. He has 10+ years of experience in crafting content that resonate with techies at all levels. His interests span from writing, technology, building cool stuff, to music.
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