Test automation engineers are inevitably confronted with the difficult challenge of testing a screen containing hundreds–if not thousands–of data values. Designing an approach to interact with this complex data can be a nightmare, often resulting in countless programming loops that navigate through volumes of data. Greg Paskal shares an innovative way to approach these automation challenges by breaking the problem into its logical parts. First, understand the data and how to organize it using the Complex Data Methodology, and second, execute common programmatic tasks resulting in shorter automation run times. This approach can be applied to Web and client systems, and adapted easily to other technologies. Automators scripting in languages such as VB Script will find this approach innovative, breaking down automation challenges to optimize performance while still producing meaningful results.

Developers and other project stakeholders are paying increased attention to test automation because of its promise to speed development and reduce the costs of systems over their complete lifecycle. Unfortunately, flawed test automation efforts have prevented many teams from achieving the productivity and savings that their organizations expect and demand. Clint Sprauve shares his real-world experiences, exposing the most common bad habits that test automation teams practice. He reveals the common misconceptions about keyword-driven testing, test-driven development, behavior-driven development, and methodologies that can lead to futility-based test automation. Regardless of your test automation methodology or whether you operate in a traditional or agile development environment, Clint offers a solution on how to avoid the “crazy cycle” of script maintenance and ways to incrementally improve your test automation practices.

Keyword-driven testing is an accepted UI test automation technique used by mature organizations to overcome the disadvantages of record/playback test automation. Unfortunately, keyword-driven testing has drawbacks in terms of maintenance and complexity because applications easily can require thousands of automation keywords. To navigate and construct test cases based on so many keywords is extremely cumbersome and can be impractical. Join Dietmar Strasser to learn how state-driven testing employs an application state-transition model as its basis for UI testing to address the disadvantages of keyword-driven testing. By defining the states and transitions of UI objects in a model, you can minimize the set of allowed UI actions at a specific point in a test script, requiring fewer keywords.

You have been told repeatedly that test automation is a good thing and that you need to automate your testing. So, how do you know where to start? If you have started and your efforts don’t seem to be paying back your investment, what should you do? Although you believe automation is a good thing, how can you convince your management? Karen Rosengren takes you through a set of practical and proven steps to build a customized test automation strategy based on your organization’s needs. She focuses on the real problem you are trying to solve-repetitive manual test effort that can be significantly reduced through automation. Using concrete examples, Karen shows you how to develop a strategy for automation that addresses real-not theoretical-savings. She shares how she has demonstrated the business value of automation to executives and gained both buy-in and the necessary budget to be successful.