QA plays a crucial part in product quality and product delivery. In agile development procedure like scrum, QA needs to work in highly flatten verification execution cycles. One of the provocation the QA engineer's face is that the coding that was done in previous iteration/sprints often gets beaten by the new features and bug fixes in each subsequent sprint, increasing the risk of regression. Without test automation it might be hard to achieve sufficient test coverage and provide rapid feedback.

WHEN TO AUTOMATE?

Check if your application is automation ready?
Below are the questions you need to ask yourself before you rush to automate the tests.
1. Is your application ready for automation?
2. Do you have skilled testers in your team?
3. Have you selected the right tool?

WHAT TO AUTOMATE??

Then it is an unrealistic and impractical expectation!!
1. AUTOMATE REPETITIVE STUFF!!
2. AUTOMATE THE TESTS THAT ARE HARD TO BE PERFORMED MANUALLY.
3. AUTOMATE BVT/SMOKE TESTS

WHAT NOT TO AUTOMATE?

Do not try to automate the tests that would require human intelligence and intuition.

1. Tests which are not executed frequently or would be too cumbersome to automate.
2. Tests like exploratory testing which based on intuition and expertise of the tester.
3. An automated test should be able to run and verify the outcome entirely unattended.
4. Do not automate the volatile features which will have frequent changes.