Experiences of Test Automation (eBook)

This is the eBook version of the printed book.

Test automation involves using software tools to manage and streamline key tasks involved in test execution, control, and reporting. Using test automation, leading software developers are finding more bugs earlier, when they're easier and less expensive to fix. Test automation makes it possible for development teams to avoid expensive mistakes in both testing and programming, and to deliver higher quality software far more rapidly. For these reasons, many organizations are seeking to automate testing, but doing so successfully is not easy.

In this book, over forty pioneering implementers share their experiences and best practices in twenty-eight case studies. Drawing on their insights, you can avoid the pitfalls associated with test automation, and achieve powerful results on every metric you care about: quality, cost, time to market, usability, and value.

Authors Dorothy Graham and Mark Fewster wrote the field's seminal text, Software Test Automation, the book that has guided thousands of organizations towards successful test automation. Now, in Experiences of Test Automation, they reveal test automation at work in a wide spectrum of organizations and projects, from complex government systems to medical devices, SAP business process development to Android mobile apps and cloud migrations. The book fully addresses both management and technical issues, presenting both failures and successes, brilliant ideas and disastrous missteps and, above all, offering specific lessons you can use. Coverage includes

• An agile team's test automation journey: the first year

• Implementing continuous regression testing in production

• Improving communication, scoping automation, leveraging standards, and keeping things simple

• Developing automation frameworks for real-time mission-critical systems

• Using Model-Based Testing (MBT) to rapidly generate new tests when applications change

• Automating large systems built by hundreds of developers and testers

• Choosing the right tools for your projects and environment

• Using small, simple 'point solutions' and disposable scripts to quickly drive significant value

• Accelerating and improving portability testing

• Using automated random test execution

• Recognizing when to ignore your consultant

• Standardizing test automation across multiple teams

Experiences of Test Automation will be invaluable to everyone considering, implementing, or using test automation: system, software, and user acceptance testers, analysts, developers, test managers, and QA professionals alike.

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Software test automation has moved beyond a luxury to become a necessity. Applications and systems have grown ever larger and more complex, and manual testing simply cannot keep up. As technology changes, and more organizations move into agile development, testing must adapt-and quickly. Test automation is essential, but poor automation is wasteful-how do you know where your efforts will take you? Authors Dorothy Graham and Mark Fewster wrote the field's seminal text, Software Test Automation, which has guided many organizations toward success. Now, in Experiences of Test Automation, they reveal test automation at work in a wide spectrum of organizations and projects, from complex government systems to medical devices, SAP business process development to Android mobile apps and cloud migrations. This book addresses both management and technical issues, describing failures and successes, brilliant ideas and disastrous decisions and, above all, offers specific lessons you can use. Coverage includes Test automation in agile development How management support can make or break successful automation The importance of a good testware architecture and abstraction levels Measuring benefits and Return on Investment (ROI) Management issues, including skills, planning, scope, and expectations Model-Based Testing (MBT), monkey testing, and exploratory test automation The importance of standards, communication, documentation, and flexibility in enterprise-wide automation Automating support activities Which tests to automate, and what not to automate Hidden costs of automation: maintenance and failure analysis The right objectives for test automation: why "e;finding bugs"e; may not be a good objective Highlights, consisting of lessons learned, good points, and helpful tips Experiences of Test Automation will be invaluable to everyone considering, implementing, using, or managing test automation. Testers, analysts, developers, automators and automation architects, test managers, project managers, QA professionals, and technical directors will all benefit from reading this book.