Prashant Lambat Sr. Manager SQA Engineering Symantec Corporation, Pune Date: 29 th January 2011

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

Build Validation Testing Regression Testing Load Testing Performance Testing New Feature Testing

In-house developed tools Open source tools Commercial automation tools

Functional Testing QTP, Test Complete, Silk Test, IBM Rational Robot Performance Testing Load Runner

Features suitable to Application under test Cost per license Execution License policy Stability of the tool Technical Support Technical Community Forums/Blogs

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)

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.

“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

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!

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.

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

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

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.

Test Automation Let’s talk business by -Igor Gershovich