From my experience, successful software QA automation requires not just tool expertise but also team innovation and creativity.
For one of our recent engagements, our QA engineers established an automated smoke test using Selenium. The smoke test was incorporated into the continuous integration environment and applied following system builds to ensure the latest software changes did not break any of the main system functionalities.
The use of Selenium as the base tool required the creation of a custom framework to launch the automations and enable the use of a dataset to support the testing “paths” dynamically rather than hardcoding each of the data locations within the automations themselves.
Engineering a testing path/location repository solution as part of this framework provided the ability to manage a single automation with a variety of data conditions and locations. There are 3 main benefits of this approach:
- Maintenance – The number of automations to create and maintain are reduced significantly. Therefore as the application changes, and the testing automation needs to be updated, there is less automation code to maintain, which reduces ongoing costs.
- Velocity – New data paths can be added quickly and painlessly without the need to open up the automation code/logic itself.
- Quality – spending less time on keeping existing testing conditions working means more time can be spent on assuring new code works as expected.
By solving the problem in such a way that focuses on the data conditions rather than the automation, the ROI on automation testing is improved tremendously. The agility to make adjustments maintains the velocity of the software development process and more time can be applied to testing new functionality. Cheaper, Faster, More Quality.
I’m proud of our team’s willingness to implement the best possible solution through not only their technical skills, but creative thought and innovation.
Jim Leichtenschlag – Practice Leader GlobalNow IT
SIgn up