I've been in a couple of companies that have some experience in test automation, and below in very short sentences I'll show you their typical track record.
They,
1. Hear about test automation
2. Think: Holy Grail !!
3. Call test tools sales people
4. Listen to sales
5. Believe sales (who doesn't?)
6. Only remember 'record/playback'
7. Go to management
8. Make them cum in their pants talking about ROI and total automated test coverage usable by business people
9. Hire cheapest junior test engineer in the universe
10. Tell him to automate everything (Don't forget to tell him about record/playback off course)
11. wait 6 months
12. See automation in action and feel like God
13. Wait for new release
14. Notice that the tests do not work anymore
15. Discover maintenance
16. Call test tools sales people again
17. Yell at them for not mentioning maintenance
18. Estimate size of maintenance
19. Stay at home with depression for six weeks
20. Come back to work
21. Throw out automated test suite
22. Get yelled at by management for not delivering on promises
23. Do research
24. Discover: stability of UAT, GUI dependency, Data control, suitable test cases, ...
25. Discover framework
26. Start over
27. Hire senior test automater
28. Make a plan of attack
29. Make a test framework
30. Start with most suitable test cases
31. improve framework
32. Maintain framework for new versions
33. Have a maintainable, usefull test suitethat's beneficial for your company!! woohoo!
You would think that it's easy to skip the first 22 steps, but one way or another you see it again and again. There's a million whitepapers on the net about test automation, please look them up. It will save you money (lots) and headache (even more).
Happy automating!!
1 opmerking:
Thanks for the list. Are those steps followed by most of the companies?
I have been into Test Automation for over 2+ yrs. But in none of them I had an oppurtunity to start from begining.
I was not even involved in feasbility testing of a product (research).
-Sinivas.
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