A familiar question from Management
Hello All, I'm sure this is a very familiar question that we have all gotten from our management at some point. How long will the Automation effort take to automate a particular application....
Forum Discussion
As you have already mentioned, this question can't be answered simply, and the answer depends on many factors.
The best way in your case would be to automate several manual scenarios and measure how much time it takes you to create an automated test comparing to run it manually. I strongly recommend to multiply the time you get by 1.5-2 :)
For example, in my case if I have a 15-minutes manual test, then it takes me ~1 hour to automate it, providing that all necessary common code exists and I only need to create the test itself. So, here multiplier is equal to 4. However, if during creating the test I need to additionally create some common code, then multiplier may increase up to 10 (because common code must be reusable and therefore common code implementation is more difficult).
Lets assume that we created the test and added it to the test suite. During several first runs we will have to spend about an hour to stabilize the test. And finally 1 additional hour per month should be taken into account for maintaining such test.
That's how I calculate the time for myself, you own experiments' results might be quite different).
The best way in your case would be to automate several manual scenarios and measure how much time it takes you to create an automated test comparing to run it manually. I strongly recommend to multiply the time you get by 1.5-2 :)
For example, in my case if I have a 15-minutes manual test, then it takes me ~1 hour to automate it, providing that all necessary common code exists and I only need to create the test itself. So, here multiplier is equal to 4. However, if during creating the test I need to additionally create some common code, then multiplier may increase up to 10 (because common code must be reusable and therefore common code implementation is more difficult).
Lets assume that we created the test and added it to the test suite. During several first runs we will have to spend about an hour to stabilize the test. And finally 1 additional hour per month should be taken into account for maintaining such test.
That's how I calculate the time for myself, you own experiments' results might be quite different).