Increasing focus on simplifying test automation

Increasing focus on simplifying test automation

At the end of the day, are your product’s stakeholders interested in how complex your automation code is, how much automation you built, how native or high end your automation setup is or how it has helped in determining the quality and readiness of the product for release. In all likelihood, it is the last one that they would be most interested in. However, what is changing today is the rise in the number of people using the test automation. Right from developers, to build engineers, to operations and support teams a lot of entities in the product team are using the automation. A lot more, including non-technical people such as business and marketing groups are looking at the automation results to interpret the status of quality. Within the testing team itself, people who lack expertise with programming languages are executing the automation code, trying to make fixes, build new automation on top of the scalable automation framework etc. Teams are increasingly dynamic in their size and structure that the same person who worked on the automation of a certain piece of the product may not be responsible for a subsequent release. Read more »

Automation is not purely a testing technique, it is more of a test empowering technique

Automation is not purely a testing technique, it is more of a test empowering technique

Automated testing is a very popular technique to bring in repeatability in a test effort. Testers have long been leveraging this technique from the days of record and play software to the current days of framework driven, behavioural driven commercial and open source test automation. In today’s need for continuous delivery, test automation is a very heavily used technique to bring in the required coverage in the limited amount of time and resources on hand. However, automation is extending into newer horizons. It is definitely not limited to just test coverage anymore. Anything that could be automated to bring in more efficiencies and enhance the team productivity is a good candidate that teams are considering today. In fact the ROI of a test automation effort, which was earlier a heavily used and measured term is now gradually losing meaning, as automation is purely not just about a test effort. From a usage standpoint as well, varied entities be it developers, build engineers, designers, in some cases even business teams use an automation suite – end of the day, automation is increasingly touching newer areas of activities and newer personas. For example, any build related activities, test environment setup, data generation, are all actively considered for automation. How much you have automated is not really a data point that stakeholders are interested in knowing any more. How has automation helped you save the overall release time and enhance end user satisfaction through better quality, is what they are more focused on. Automation has thus become the larger umbrella under which test automation is just one aspect for testers to consider.

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Need for more adaptive automation testing

Need for more adaptive automation testing

DevOps as a trend is on the rise. Studies show that number of organizations adopting devops continues to grow with every passing year. One of the core requirements in the devops world is higher automated software testing. Even manual testers would soon have to take on automated testing in possible areas of their operations. To this effect, automation teams have been thinking out of the box to create automation frameworks that do much of the heavy lifting upfront enabling easier and more effective automated testing to be taken up by one and all on the test team. However one ongoing flaw in all of this, is the disconnect between the test automation and the varied test effort management systems including the test case and defect management systems.

This has been an area of research at QA InfoTech in the recent months to help draw a complete connect in the automation effort E2E and enable automation in the truest essence. This has finally been taking shape where we expect to see measurable outcomes of around 100% automated effort (meaning a test case when automated is fully automated – there is no manual effort involved), a tight coupling between defect management and automation execution, and considerable time savings on the tester’s plate – this is what we call the adaptive automation testing framework.

We have our annual technical symposium, Qualloquium coming up on Sept 19th. This is one of the topics the automation team would be presenting on, explaining how the framework operates and what benefits it can bring to the table. We are very excited for our audience, to encourage more of our manual testers also take on automation and importantly also enable our automation engineers to take on more productive automation, as more teams move into the DevOps world.