Implementing automated acceptance or integration tests as part of a project is a very common thing to do nowadays. Even though already in “the earlier days” of software development often some scripting was done to automate certain testing functionality, this has gained a lot more momentum with the move towards Agile Software Development. On one side this has let to much better tool support as there is a huge variety of – freely available – Test Automation Frameworks available nowadays. But on the other side the complexity of the Software under Test (SuT) and also the demand towards the Automated Tests in complicacy and number is increasing.

The following shows a kind of my personal top-5 list of problems that pop up quite regulary in the context of Test Automation for “bigger” (read non-trivial) projects. For sure there is no universally valid solution to those problems, but I nevertheless tried to give some ideas on how to tackle those from my personal experience. If you do not have – or finally overcome – these problems I would be very interested to read more on this in the comments section. The same is of course true for different or additional problems (and potential solutions).
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