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Commercial Test Automation Tools and their real benefits. Prashant Lambat Sr. Manager SQA Engineering Symantec Corporation, Pune Date: 29 th January 2011. Why GUI Automation?. Save Manual Testing effort Better Test coverage across platforms Quick, Reliable, Comprehensive, Reusable
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Commercial Test Automation Tools and their real benefits Prashant Lambat Sr. Manager SQA Engineering Symantec Corporation, Pune Date: 29th January 2011
Why GUI Automation? • Save Manual Testing effort • Better Test coverage across platforms • Quick, Reliable, Comprehensive, Reusable • Things which are difficult to do manually (Simulate load) • Find Defects early in the cycle
Candidates for Automation • Build Validation Testing • Regression Testing • Load Testing • Performance Testing • New Feature Testing
Ways to go for automation tool • In-house developed tools • Open source tools • Commercial automation tools
Commercial tools available • Functional Testing • QTP , Test Complete, Silk Test, IBM Rational Robot • Performance Testing • Load Runner
Tool Selections • Features suitable to Application under test • Cost per license • Execution License policy • Stability of the tool • Technical Support • Technical Community • Forums/Blogs
Benefits of commercial Automation Tools? • Ease of use –Commercial automation tools are much simpler and easy to use. • Technical Support: Commercial automation tools provides support to the corporate world • Cost: Looks high however looking at the skills/investment to develop similar kind of tool and support we get its worth. • Most commercial tools matches the pace of technologies changes, they usually support Web/GUI technologies(.Net, MFC, WPF, etc)
Benefits of commercial Automation Tools? • Commercial tools usually have a large community of users, which translates into better availability of qualified resources • Requires not so advanced programming • Commercial tools are integrated or can be integrated test case management tools or automation infrastructure.
Myth “Test Automation is simple, that every tester can do it” Automation process: • Record the script • Enhance the script Execution • Run the scripts • Report results Under the influence of this myth the QA manager can proudly say: All our testers are developing test automation. *Note –This still works if planned properly. In most cases it fails, ~60 of automation projects fails because of poor planning and execution
Ground Reality Test automation is a software development task • Automation should be designed, developed and Tested • You need to have some kind of a programming background to implement test automation. • Test Automation is not as complex as system programming. • Test automation standards should be developed • Automated test components are assets that should be treated like application source code Automation is LOGIC not MAGIC!
Saving Manual Testing Efforts Manual test cycle takes 8 hours to execute one cycle To Automate the same, automation takes 40 hours In a release if there are 5 test cycles to be done then we hit a break even. If there are more cycles to be done across releases for e.g. 10 then we have 40 hours savings in terms of testing efforts.
Actual benefits… • More testing gets done faster, increasing the odds of finding defects • Defects found early have better chances of being fixed • Manual Testers can concentrate on exploratory testing to find more defects than spending time on repeating the same testing. • Hotfix or service pack testing can be done overnight with good test coverage in various product areas. This is not possible via manual testing in a short span of time
Key success Factors for Successful automation • Structured Automation • Throw away code automation by Manual Test Engineer • Automate Test Execution • Make automation execution uninterrupted • Build An Infrastructure to track maintain automation efforts
Key success Factors for Successful automation • Infrastructure to keep track of all the execution results • Keep Test case management and Defect Tracking system different from Automation infrastructure • Keep links to Test case management system and Defect Tracking system • Automate new features once the feature is code complete. • Use Version Control system which is used for product development (CVS, Perforce etc) • Set the expectations right in the beginning…you may not get returns in the first release it self.
Reference • Test Automation Let’s talk business by -Igor Gershovich