Loading ...Seapine featured a booth at SD West 2007 in San Jose this weekend and I was on hand working the booth. This year we focused on the new QA Wizard Pro 2007 product. There are a lot of companies who are interested in looking into Automated testing for their organization. There is always a lot of excitement and the prospect of automated testing and I try to temper this excitement just a little in explaining that the relationship with an automated testing tool is a marriage meaning it requires a real commitment to implement a successful automated process. Once all the initial excitement wears off there is a lot of work that goes into automated test solution in order to make it a valuable QA asset.
There are some very good tips I read a long time ago when Seapine was first getting into the automated testing market, and these tips are still very true today.
http://www.jeffgainer.com/testmyth.html
Jeff’s short article is designed to prepare users for the reality of automated testing and to not get too caught up with the excitement that automated testing brings with simple rules like not to get to complex with automated testing, make a real investment into the process (meaning time) and remember that automated testing does not eliminate manual testing .
There is an article I also read at the same time from Bret Pettichord which lays out the sever steps to automated test success. Its a very good read and I remember this article whenever I implement or present our solution to organization. Just like with manual testing the better organized and the more you plan and outline your process the more success you will have with your testing solution. And the article by Bret provides a nice level of detail to describe how that might work.
http://www.io.com/~wazmo/papers/seven_steps.html
There’s always a sense of real relief that washes over a QA testers face when they find out they can automate the 10,000 data entry tests they had been performing manually. Constant repetitive tasks are mind numbing and turning those over to the machine is always a welcomed change. I think data driven automated testing is one of the most beneficial features of automated test tools, but there is a lot you can accomplish with tool like QAWP. The more scripts that are written the larger your regression suite becomes which means as your software applications increase in size and complexity your QA regression suite grows with it. When done successfully QA testers can focus on manual testing of new features or complex tests and the machine can run the regression and data driven tests prior to each build. Some groups even use automated tests to regression or smoke test application builds on a monthly, weekly or sometimes daily basis (unit testing is better for continuous integration testing as automated tests usually take longer to run, though automating smoke tests could be continuous depending on build frequency).
If you haven’t already head over to http://labs.seapine.com and checkout the new QAWP beta. Its a big improvement over the last version of QA Wizard where the biggest noticeable difference is the VB scripting language used for scripts themselves.
Getting back to the Jolt Awards. I was able to attend the ceremony this year which was hosted by Craig from craigslist. Part of the ceremony was done using Second Life. Seapine won a Jolt for TestTrack in the bug tracking category. We’ll be working hard this year to see to it that Surround SCM and QAWP make it to the finals next year!