Building an effective automated testing strategy is a team effort. To improve the overall effectiveness of your testing in mabl, we recommend conducting regular workspace reviews with your team.
This article suggests focus areas for a regularly-occurring workspace review process. Whether your team is getting started in mabl or working in an established workspace that could use some organization, setting up time to regularly review your workspace activity can help you create a more efficient testing workflow. Depending on your team’s requirements, you may want to skip focus areas that aren’t relevant or add additional focus areas.
Tests
Regular test reviews help you eliminate outdated or redundant tests, making your suite more efficient and easier to collaborate on. When reviewing new or updated tests, ensure they are aligned with your testing objectives and easy for anyone on the team to maintain. For example, adding clarification to unclear steps can help make future collaboration and debugging easier.
To identify tests created or updated within a specific date range, use the activity feed: Settings > Activity feed. To review changes to existing tests, use the compare view on the test details page.
Examples of questions to ask when reviewing a test include:
- Does the test follow naming conventions?
- Do any test steps need clarification?
- Does the test meet other team requirements?
- If the test was updated, why did we make these updates?
For more best practices on test creation, see the article on making your tests easy to understand.
Flows
Flows are powerful tools for reusing common actions, but they can lose their value if they’re unclear or underutilized. Reviewing flows on a regular basis ensures that they remain useful for your team, reducing repetitive work and minimizing maintenance when changes are needed. For example, a well designed login flow can save hours of work if reused consistently.
To identify flows created or updated within a specific date range, use the activity feed: Settings > Activity feed. For updated flows, use the compare view to review changes.
Examples of questions to ask when reviewing flows include:
- Does the flow follow naming conventions?
- Do any flow steps need further clarification?
- Is the flow used in any tests?
- Is everyone using existing flows when they can?
For more best practices on flow creation, see the article on creating effective flows.
Plans
Plans are essential to your automated testing strategy. However, if they are unused or incorrectly configured, they can waste resources and create missed opportunities. Review active plans on a regular basis to ensure they align with your team’s goals and trigger tests when necessary. For example, if workspace has an active plan that hasn’t been executed in many weeks, you could investigate whether there is a misaligned opportunity or an abandoned workflow.
Go to the Plans page to review plans in your workspace. Use the filters to surface plans that may require further investigation. For example, to find plans with no tests, set the On/Off filter to “Off” and look for plans with a disabled plan button.
Save your filters for future reviews by creating a direct link: right click anywhere on the page and select “copy URL for browser” from the context menu. The copied URL contains query params that automatically set your saved filters, so you don’t have to set them up for your next workspace review.
Questions to ask when reviewing plans include:
- If a plan has no tests, should it be removed or updated?
- If an active plan has no triggers, should it be removed, updated, or temporarily turned off?
Test status
Understanding the health of your test suite is critical to ensuring reliable automation. By reviewing test statuses, you can identify and fix flaky or failing tests before they cause delays. For instance, surfacing tests with long run times can reveal inefficiencies that may slow down your entire CI/CD pipeline.
To review the state of test runs, go to the coverage overview dashboard and set the filters to define the tests you want to review.
Use the filters in the Test status table to surface tests that may require further investigation:
| Focus area | Filter |
| Tests that haven’t run | Click on the Latest status column to sort in ascending order. Look for tests with a “Not run” indicator. |
| Broken or unused tests | Click on the Pass rate column to sort in ascending order. |
| Tests with a long run time | Click on the Avg. test run time column to sort in descending order. |
| Tests with the most significant change in performance | Click on the Performance change column to sort in descending order. |
Questions to ask when reviewing test status include:
- Are we getting value from all of the tests?
- Which tests aren’t passing consistently?
- Are there any flaky tests that need fixed?
Role-based access control (RBAC)
Managing access to resources through resource groups is important from both a security and a collaboration perspective. From a security perspective, maintaining resource groups helps ensure that only authorized users have access to sensitive data and resources. From a collaboration perspective, resource groups help you set up your workspace in a way that reflects your team structure, making it easier to manage shared resources across multiple teams.
To make sure the right people have access to the right resources, review the resource groups in your workspace: Settings > Resource groups.
Questions to ask when reviewing RBAC include:
- Do the resource groups in our workspace reflect our team structure?
- Are there resources that we need to share across multiple teams?
- For a given resource group, do role assignments reflect who should have permission to access these resources?
Next steps
After identifying your team’s focus areas for your workspace review, decide how often you want to review and create a plan for reviewing.
Decide how often to review
Depending on what you want to review and what’s realistic for your team, you may decide to review some aspects of your workspace on a biweekly basis and other aspects on a monthly basis.
Create a review plan
Create a checklist-style template for conducting your workspace review. If you need inspiration, check out mabl’s customizable workspace audit template. Make sure the template includes a section for writing action items to follow up on after the review.