QA Corner: What’s going on?
As software development strategies and tools improve so does software testing. Today many tools exist for automating software testing in terms of regression testing, use case/gui testing, unit testing, smoke testing, stress testing or memory leak testing. Automated Software Testing is a modern term that one could think of some kind of panacea, almighty tools that with little afford are solving almost every problem of modern software testing with ease, thus minimizing costs and time. Well, you might guess, it’s not that simple. Although a huge variety of automated software testing frameworks (ASTF) exist, most are tied to solve specific tasks on specific platforms. The challenge is not only to pick the right tool for the right job but also there are several other key issues that have to be looked at to get a pleasant Return of Investment (ROI) from the ASTF in charge.
These keys are:
- Know your Requirements: Thoroughly knowing and understanding the “System Under Test” is one of the most important factors that will impact the success of the AST implementation.
- Develop the Automated Test Strategy: Within the automation strategy, we define the scope, objectives, approach, test framework, tools, test environment and schedule requirements related to the automated testing effort. It’s about the goals and non-goals.
- Test the Automated Software Testing Framework: Automated Software Tests are human created and thus error prone as well. The ASTF has to be tested that it behaves like expected.
- Track the progress, and adjust accordingly: ASTF could reach its limits in a while and maybe needs adjustments/improvements or to be exchanged.
- Implement the AST Process: Implementing a successful AST effort requires a well-defined, structured, but of course lightweight process with minimal overhead. How to automate tests using minimum effort? And of course…
- Put the right people on the Job: Because what would we do without our employees?
The HSG QA process is not marked in time thus is doing the next step to further improve this very aspect of software development – introducing automation into the software testing process within the scope of the project named “Implementing Automated Software Testing”.
Because developing our own ASTF is of course out of the scope, I’m going to evaluate existing ASTF candidates in the first step (“Picking the right tool for the job”). The ASTF names are Microsoft’s Test and Lab Manager (MTLM) included in the Visual Studio 2010 beta 2, IBM’s Functional Tester and Selenium – three ASTF that claim to offer a wide language and platform compatibility while easy to use.
During this process I’m also trying to acquire as much information on automation testing as possible. One of my major sources for this task is the book “Implementing Automated Software Testing” that is recently complementing our library. Needless to say that i’m keeping you up to date in this Blog on what’s going on in my “QA Corner” during the next months.
