The future for Test Automation Sarah Saltzman EMEA Manager for Quality Test Management Summit January 31 st, 2007

Page 2 The software testing marketplace Distributed Automated software Quality marketplace grew 20% in 2005 (IDC) Blurring of focus – Developer testing seen as a growth area, therefore co-ordination of effort will become important (IDC) Spend in Testing phase of SDLC increasing as a percentage of whole project (Ovum) Automation tools percieved as under-utilised, 20 – 40% usage model (Ovum) Test Management – the new de facto tool (was test automation tool) (Ovum)

Page 3 The software testing marketplace

Page 4 The software testing marketplace Drivers –Compliance –Business aligned IT –Process maturity –Complexity of technologies –Productivity improvements –Off-shore investment –Application Security –SOA

Page 5 Some approaches Keyword / Data driven testing Requirements based testing Risk based testing Test Frameworks / harnesses using automation tool Model driven testing, early stages

Page 6 How are test automation tools used today? Testers with a development background – automated tool user Testers with a User background (phased) –Keyword driven testing –manual testing –Automated testing Not the entire team (why?) Developers – rarely use them (why?) Competitor to test automation is manual testing or no testing….

Page 7 What’s emerging? Keyword driven testing – the next stage Model driven testing Visual testing Dropping support for older technologies Traceability Metrics and measures

Page 8 What’s missing? Support for specific frameworks / packages – at a deep technical level? Root cause analysis? Easy migration to automation? Easier script maintenance? Intelligent test tools? Integrations with other tools or other vendors? Testing in development??!! Support distributed (global) deployments? Ease of use…… (that old chestnut!!)

Page 9 For discussion … ROT –if you run a test more than 3 times, it is worth automation effort… –Who should be automating tests? –What is preventing the wholesale adoption of automated testing tools? –What features would we like to see in the future? –How can we influence the vendors? –How can we take automation to the development teams?