Engineering executives tell me that test automation is essential. Why? Because, they say, “My team is being asked to test more and more complexity in less and less time. Testing is the last thing standing between a product release and our ability to collect revenue.” Okay. No argument.
Next I talk to a QA automation engineer and ask, “What is test automation?” She says, “This is the creation of scripts that allow a computer to run the tests so that a tester doesn’t have to do it manually.” Sounds reasonable.
So I ask a manual tester, “What do you spend most of your time doing?” The answer I hear is, “A lot of things: reading specs, designing and documenting tests, setting up the lab, loading new software builds, running tests, analyzing results, generating bug reports, producing test reports, and attending (too many) meetings.”
It’s not surprising to me that a lot of manual testers just don’t have enough time to learn all of the ins and outs of test automation. Understanding testbed abstraction, modular design, parameterization, and a bunch of other things takes time. The payoff is big, of course, but I’ve heard someone say, “These guys are too busy sinking to figure out how to grab the life preserver.”
A couple of Fanfare’s customers have done something quite interesting. They realized that in that list of things that testers do every day, there are a lot of time-consuming tasks that can be automated much more easily than the complex tests they are trying to perform. So why not start with the low-hanging fruit? These guys have figured out that a tester might spend 2 or 3 hours a day just configuring a lab or loading new software before they can start their testing. Compared with learning how to create modular fully automated tests with rigorous analysis that will work forever, this setup stuff is easy to automate using Fanfare: just capture-replay! Who cares about maintainability and portability and extensibility and all those fancy concepts we expect in test automation.
Don’t get me wrong. I believe that every organization should pursue full automation of all testing, and the ROI is enormous. But in an organization that is barely keeping their heads above water (sound like anyone familiar?), one way to get there is to automate some of the simpler stuff first – and that simpler stuff might not actually be the testing! You can use iTest to automate almost anything. So think about “lab setup automation” or “device upgrade automation” or “manual bug report automation”, or come with your own ideas.
And here’s the main point. Once this kind of automation takes even an hour or two out of each tester’s day, perhaps they will then have enough breathing room to start learning how to build really great automated tests, too!
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Kingston Duffie is the founder and CTO of Fanfare. Learn more about Kingston >> |
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