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Over the past several years, tools that help programmers quickly create applications with graphical user interfaces have dramatically improved programmer productivity.
This has increased the pressure on testers, who are often perceived as bottlenecks to the delivery of software products. Testers are being asked to test more and more code in less and less time. They need to dramatically improve their own productivity. Test automation is one way to do this.
The Promise Of Test Automation
Test automation implementations are expected to achieve some or all of the following objectives;
- Speed up testing to accelerate releases
- Allow testing to happen more frequently
- Reduce costs of testing by reducing manual labour
- Improve test coverage
- Ensure consistency
- Improve the reliability of testing
- Allow testing to be done by staff with less skill
- Define the testing process and reduce dependence on the few who know it
- Make testing more interesting; reduce the mundane repetitive execution of tests.
This is the promise of test automation.
The Reality
Unfortunately, more often than not, automation implementations fail due for a number of reasons, the most common being;
- Effective test automation requires developer skills, already a rare commodity,
- Building a regression test suite requires significantly more time to develop than purported by the tool vendors,
- A reasonable maturity and competence in manual testing is lacking,
- Maintenance of the regression suite becomes unmanageable with the number of changes implemented in each release,
- The application must be available and stable before script development/ maintenance can take place,
- ROI on the tools and labour seldom, if ever, occurs in the short term,
- Test Automation Engineers are seldom included as an integral part of the development/test team,
- The Test Automation Engineers automate the tests previously executed for each release, adding to the regression test pack. This results in a large number of (short) segmented automated tests.
- A number of automated testing “frameworks” exist but require an army of consultants to maintain,
- Metrics are difficult to determine as the test automation scripts do not necessarily report into the Test Management tool effectively.
The result of these issues is a significant waste of money and resources.
For more information on Automation please contact us or call us on +27 11 317 3684 and we will gladly be of further assistance.
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