Topic: Automation Testing Basics

Message

   Automation Testing Basics

A lot of people have asked us
about automated testing. This is an important subject for us since we
feel like it's the most important part of my job. We know a lot about
software development, so it's clearly not the best use of my time to
click on the same button looking for the same dialog box every single
day. Part of smart testing is delegating those kinds of tasks away so
we can spend my time on harder problems. And computers are a great
place to delegate repetitive work.

That's really what automated
testing is about. We try to get computers to do my job for me. One of
the ways we describe our goal as a tester is to put myself out of a job
- meaning that we automate our entire job. This is, of course,
unachievable so we don't worry about losing our job. But it's a good
vision. My short term goal is always to automate the parts of our job
we find most annoying with the selfish idea of not having to do
annoying stuff any more.

With people new to automated testing,
that's always how we frame it. Start small, pick an easy menial task
that you have to do all the time. Then figure out how to have a
computer do it for you. This has a great effect on your work since
after you get rid of the first one that will free up more of your time
to automate more and more annoying, repetitive tasks. Now with all this
time you can go an focus on testing more interesting parts of your
software.

That last paragraph makes it sound like writing
automated tests is easy, when in fact it's typically quite hard. There
are some fundamentally hard problems in this space, and those are what
we are going to talk about most here. Lots of test tools try to help
out with these problems in different ways, and we highly recommend
finding a tool that works for you. Unfortunately all the tools we use
here are custom built internal tools (it's one of the advantages of a
huge development team, we have people who's full time jobs are
developing test tools for us.) So I can't really recommend specific
tools. But I will talk about are the two major parts of an automated
test, the major problems involved, and some of the general ways to
solve those problems. Hopefully it will be valuable as a way to better
understand automated testing and as a way to help choose your own test
tools. As a side note, implementing automated tests for a text based or
API based system is really pretty easy, we are going to focus on a full
UI application - which is where the interesting issues are.

Automated test can be broken into two big pieces: Driving your program and Validating the results.

Author	Message
tanushree Senior Member Joined: 04Apr2007 Online Status: Offline Posts: 2160	Topic: Automation Testing Basics Posted: 17Oct2007 at 6:19am
	Automation Testing Basics A lot of people have asked us about automated testing. This is an important subject for us since we feel like it's the most important part of my job. We know a lot about software development, so it's clearly not the best use of my time to click on the same button looking for the same dialog box every single day. Part of smart testing is delegating those kinds of tasks away so we can spend my time on harder problems. And computers are a great place to delegate repetitive work. That's really what automated testing is about. We try to get computers to do my job for me. One of the ways we describe our goal as a tester is to put myself out of a job - meaning that we automate our entire job. This is, of course, unachievable so we don't worry about losing our job. But it's a good vision. My short term goal is always to automate the parts of our job we find most annoying with the selfish idea of not having to do annoying stuff any more. With people new to automated testing, that's always how we frame it. Start small, pick an easy menial task that you have to do all the time. Then figure out how to have a computer do it for you. This has a great effect on your work since after you get rid of the first one that will free up more of your time to automate more and more annoying, repetitive tasks. Now with all this time you can go an focus on testing more interesting parts of your software. That last paragraph makes it sound like writing automated tests is easy, when in fact it's typically quite hard. There are some fundamentally hard problems in this space, and those are what we are going to talk about most here. Lots of test tools try to help out with these problems in different ways, and we highly recommend finding a tool that works for you. Unfortunately all the tools we use here are custom built internal tools (it's one of the advantages of a huge development team, we have people who's full time jobs are developing test tools for us.) So I can't really recommend specific tools. But I will talk about are the two major parts of an automated test, the major problems involved, and some of the general ways to solve those problems. Hopefully it will be valuable as a way to better understand automated testing and as a way to help choose your own test tools. As a side note, implementing automated tests for a text based or API based system is really pretty easy, we are going to focus on a full UI application - which is where the interesting issues are. Automated test can be broken into two big pieces: Driving your program and Validating the results. Post Resume: Click here to Upload your Resume & Apply for Jobs

	IP Logged


One Stop Testing Forum : Types Of Software Testing @ OneStopTesting : Automated Testing @ OneStopTesting