How effective is your Test Automation Scripting? In today’s day and age, Test driven development is a key factor for improving the code quality. Many a times, writing enough tests always don’t equate to great code quality. The quality of the tests are the single most important factor while testing an application during development lifecycle. with Agile being the mantra and more and more applications moving to cloud, the software delivery timelines (release to market) are shrinking like never before. New enhancements /features delivered at a fervent pace is the norm of the day; such being the demands of the current day market pressures, it is imperative that we produce software with highest possible quality and at the same time deliver newer features with minimal to no downtime at all. Test Automation framework has to be robust and scalable enough to allow for writing tests (automated scripts) at a story level,Component level , integration tests and end to end flow tests. The Test Automation scripting is key to the success of multiple layers of testing ; the more structured and organized the better it is to use and reuse/inherit the common classes, methods ,objects etc. This forms the backbone to any automation test application. In the world of microservices, it is important to run thousands of tests in a limited amount of time; they need to run quickly and ensure sufficient code and functional coverage. A key factor to achieve all this is how well we have architected our test automation application and authored the scripting process. Integrating Automated Testing into DevOps and Agile: This is the one of the most important aspect in DevOps and Agile. with continuous delivery and biweekly releases to production, newer features /enhancements released to customers the margin of error is close to 0 if not zero. Any downtime in production due to bad /error prone code will cause havoc specially when the codebase of multiple clients are refreshed during a single deployment to production which is more or less a norm today. While there are failsafes in place today to minimize risks but they still might not be enough. Automated testing when built in the right manner is the ONLY way to Truly test the Application for regression breaks, test newer features being released and also test for the specific customer business flows prior to the release to production. Automated Performance tests and stress tests also should act as a gate check prior to pushing the code/newer features to production.