I had the pleasure of hosting the second Online Summit, delivered by Software Test Professionals: Achieving Business Value With Test Automation.  The online summit format consists of 3 sessions each for 3 consecutive days.  The sessions for this summit were:

One of my duties as host was to try to summarize the most valuable nuggets of information from across all of the presentations into a “top tips” list.  This is what I came up with:

Scott’s Top 10 Automation Tips from:


Notes:
  • Not every tip is specific to test automation
  • Several tips are points made by more than one presenter
  • Like every good “Top 10 List”, tips are presented in reverse order (according to me)
  • I’ve paraphrased many of the tips to make them “quippy” 🙂

Tip #10: Pure record/playback => FAIL

  • Record/playback is simple, seductive, and is (in most cases) not the most valuable answer to a question worth answering.

Tip #9: Learn automation in low risk situations

  • Do not start out by automating tests against production
  • Do get your skills “up to snuff” before making promises your automation can’t keep

Tip #8: Forget ROI, think Cost/Value

  • Provide Business Value
  • The ROI of testing can’t be a positive number (unless your business product is testing services)
    • Determine what value automation can *reasonably* provide
    • Estimate the cost of providing that value
    • Ask “is that value worth the cost?”

Tip #7: Valuable automation is trustworthy

  • To be trustworthy, automation must not be excessively complex
  • Diligently avoid false positives.
    • Err on the side of false negatives.

Tip #6: Design Build Verification Tests (BVTs) to tell you if additional testing is valuable at this time

  • Do not try to design BVTs to tell you whether or not the build is release ready

Tip #5: Test at different levels to accomplish different goals — use the tools that work/makes sense

  • Unit, Object, Integration, API, and/or GUI
  • This is true for manual, automated, or other forms of testing

Tip #4: In the land of automation, test design is king

  • Brainlessly automating manual tests typically leads to a whole lot of NO VALUE
  • Modularity
  • Executable Requirements, Keywords, Classes, & Actions
  • Test Data, Test Data, Test Data

Tip #3: Collaborate … Just do it!

  • There is no wall between developers and testers, there are only politics.
    • Reject politics and collaborate to accomplish the mission
  • Testing is not a union that prohibits others from testing or testers from doing other things.
  • Enable the right people, with the right skills to add the most testing value at the right time in the most efficient/effective manner

Tip #2: Automate things that are better suited for computers to do than humans — only if they have value

  • Application deployment is a great candidate for automation – whether or not any automated testing is included.

Tip #1: Do not automate what requires human judgement.

  • Just don’t.
  • ‘nuff said.


Scott Barber
Chief Technologist, PerfTestPlus, Inc.
About.me

Co-Author, Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications
Author, Web Load Testing for Dummies
Contri
buting Author, Beautiful Testing, and How To Reduce the Cost of Testing

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