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Showing posts from April, 2014

Thrown into automation

Situation & Problem I was thrown into an automation test project. Concretely test automation of 3 different applications (different in purpose, look, structure, behavior) which regression testing was covered only by a automation test suite that was written in AutoIt and the size of the code was quite complex and huge for a new person in the automation. Well, that was not the problem, it is a description of the situation. The problems weren't initially visible. I was never automating before, so I needed to learn quite a bit of the code & got to know all the applications that were part of the project. The problems were not so appealing at the start, but I would formulate then as: Maintenance of the scripts took too long By new versions of the application, it took some time to adjust the scripts to the changes This caused delay in information flow from testers to managers & developers The changes in the application were not clearly communicated to testers

When to start automation?

If you are asking this as a tester, you probably asking too late. Automation is something that can save you some portion of your work (understand resources for your client) and i rarely found cases of testing work that did not need at least some portion of automation. I know that it is rarely understood that automation is something to be developed & maintained and if you cover enough of the application, you do not need any more regression - well i do not think that somebody has done an automation regression suite that if fully reliable (i am not speaking about maintaining this code - which is another topic). There can be always a bug (or quality issue) that slips through, even when you scripts go through the afflicted part. I understand that many testers have no development background or skills, but i doubt the developers that could help you are far away. I am not assuming that they can do the scripts for you.... However if they understand what you need, they can say how e