Agile means pace and agile means change. With frequent time-boxed releases and flexible requirements, test automation faces numerous challenges. Haven’t we all asked what to automate and how to go about the daily tasks with the automation cloud looming over our heads? Here, we’ll discuss answers to some of these questions and try to outline a number of approaches that agile teams can take in their selection of what to automate, how to go about their automation, whom to involve, and when to schedule these tasks so that the releases are debt free and of best quality. 

• What to automate: regression averse approach, selective approach, sanity automation, max automation approach
• When to automate: sprint n-1 approach, continuous automation
• How to automate – all-hands approach, shared automation expert, code-averse tool 

Let us have a look at an integration of these possibilities, the possible combinations and what may or may not work.