Automation Testing Plan: The Main Stages

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Do you want to prepare a product for release in a quality manner? In this article, you will learn how, with proper planning, test automation can significantly reduce the number of manual checks, speed up the process of going to market and increase profits in a shorter period of time. As of 2026, these principles continue to guide effective automation strategies.

Often, the implementation of automation begins with finding a professional team that selects tools and develops a solution. This step is correct, but it should not be the first.

Automation testing is a software verification process that involves performing functions and steps such as startup, initialization, execution, analysis, and output automatically through the use of specialized tools.

From the very beginning, you need to decide for what it is worth implementing automation and to what extent. A well-designed strategy will allow you to experience all the benefits of test automation, namely:

• Getting faster and more accurate test results;
• Efficient allocation of testing resources;
• Optimization of costs for product quality assurance and testing;
• Error-free testing: a quality test will not make a mistake that a person can make;
• The ability to integrate testing more closely with existing product development processes.

There are some points that you should definitely pay attention to when deciding to implement automation testing services. Now let’s talk a little about them. There are three factors:

• Product strategy
• Cost of implementation
• Prioritizing product functionality

Let’s talk about them in order.

1. Product Strategy

First of all, it is your product strategy that should determine the approach to test automation.

If the result of your work is a product that should bring the company or one customer the main income, then in this case it is worth paying more attention not to the release time, but to the quality of the product itself and the search for all possible defects.

If you have a slightly different goal, for example, you are working on an application prototype, and you need to get feedback from the target audience as soon as possible, then you need to release this product quickly in order to observe the reaction of the target audience.

In both cases, the approach to automation will be different, which means the cost of its implementation will also be different. Let’s talk about this now.

2. Cost of Implementation

To determine the cost of automation, it is important to know all the stages of a test automation implementation project:

Stage 1: Determine the scope of automation;

Stage 2: Selecting the right products;

Stage 3: Implementation of the framework;

Stage 4: Deploy and configure the environment;

Stage 5: Development and debugging of autotests;

Stage 6: Execution of tests and analysis of results;

Stage 7: Updating autotests;

Stage 8: Assess the effectiveness of automation.

The future automation solution depends on how much time you can devote to each stage.

You can also follow the advice of Brian Marik, author of When Tests Should Be Automated? (“When should a test be automated?”)

“The cost of automating a test can best be measured by the number of manual tests you just don’t have to run and the bugs you never run into.”

3. Prioritizing Product Functionality

As a rule, labor-intensive regression testing is automated first. Further, it is determined which functionality is the main one. After all, the performance of the solution will depend on its quality.

The test automation process requires the intellectual creativity of highly qualified IT specialists, but in order to achieve the set goals, it also needs to be carried out systematically. At each stage, experts choose the correct testing strategy when checking the quality of the product under investigation. The use of automation tools for software testing is relevant in the following cases:

• Writing to the database
• Logging files
• Backend processes

These are the places in the system that are most difficult to access.

Functionality with a high level of risk for errors is often prioritized. By automating critical functionality through testing, bugs are guaranteed to be found quickly.

Automated testing is effective for routine operations. For example, forms that have a large number of fields for a dataset (iteration over data). The test process allows you to automatically fill in the fields, as well as check them after saving.

This type of testing allows you to automate the process of filling in the fields with incorrect data, to check various validations.

• Long scripts (end-to-end).
• Testing data that requires accurate mathematical calculations.
• Automating the correctness of data retrieval.

Other software products are subject to automatic testing depending on the customer’s requirements and capabilities of the tool. The development of separate automation test cases makes the testing process more efficient. By creating initial conditions that have minimal impact on other tests, you can use scripts that can return the system to its original state. When tested with this functionality, the automation is maximized.

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