An engineering approach to Software Testing and Test Automation

Do you know enough about your test environment when designing a Load Test plan? What can you do and what would you do to provide stakeholders with the most valuable information in the context and at the moment? How do you use their feedback in your testing work? ...

Support and Feedback Business logic investigation, test case design, and test script programming are distinct activities. A professional automation engineer is capable of carrying out the all three, however the overall progress will slowdown. Since test automation project often starts when automated testing results are already needed there is no surprise in disappointment of the long [...] ...

Requirements Trying to do something without understanding what you are supposed to get often produces unexpected results. With regards to computer software the expectations must be even more precise and specific, as all the functionalities are built from atomic instructions executed by a machine. Test Automation, as a software development project, also needs requirements to be [...] ...

Robustness Automated Testing is about delivering test results – on time, within the Test Phase and reliable enough, with no manual retesting. There is no or minimal time reserved for scripts fixing, debugging and rerunning during the Test Cycle. If Automated Testing didn’t work then QA resources have to perform testing manually. With the above given, [...] ...

Verification Manual verification is complicated and informal. For test automation purposes, making it logical and specific requires time and effort of a seasoned professional. Workarounds like “picture-based” verification do not require formal logic but do not save man hours at the end due to high maintenance cost and manual validation and retest. Having detailed and reproducible test execution [...] ...

Coverage How thoroughly script goes through the test case flow and how many test cases are automated per test plan? Points of consideration 1) Scattered vs. in-depth functionality coverage Each functionality module of the application requires initial effort spent on GUI mapping and common functions development. However, this effort is not a pure investment as changes in the application [...] ...

Framework There are 3 most popular approaches in implementation of Test Automation, and none of them isn’t ideally suitable for any environment. Approach and problems 1) Linear scripts A single test case could be automated fairly quickly (especially using recording) but robustness without error-handling is very questionable GUI mapping is automatically performed by a Tool on the fly but duplication [...] ...

Resource Conversion To start-up in-house Test Automation companies often look for internal resources. While the benefits are obvious there are some snags on this path. Problems and impact 1) Converting manual testing QA resources to test automation Strong programming skills and technical mindset are mandatory requirements and must be considered when choosing a candidate: either previous working experience in [...] ...

General Recommendation Object-Oriented GUI Recognition method should be used whenever possible. If an object is completely supported by testing tool then wrapping functions (provided by the testing tool) should be used to interact with the object. If an object is partially supported by testing tool then object’s native methods and properties should be used when required. If [...] ...

Software Technical problems related to Test Automation Tools, and platform-product-tool compatibilities. Problems Test Automation Tool does not support Product’s platform (operating system) completely or partially Test Automation Tool does not support Product’s GUI (for Functional/Regression Test Automation) completely or partially (this may include total absence of support for the particular GUI or a need having installed specific ...