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The Four T's of Test Automation Historically, organizations have measured the level of software quality after a system goes into production. What about measuring the level of software quality coming into testing? By measuring the number of test cases that pass or fail, and calculating the failure rate, you can forecast future failure rates and the number of test cases that will have to be executed each day during test. Then, you will have the information needed to adjust resources, timelines, and level of effort. Join Jan Fish to learn how to manage and control your testing effort rather than having it control you. By tracking the number and severity of bugs by build, you can open a whole new world of information. Combining this metric with knowledge of the content of the build lets you see immediately if newly introduced functionality is stable, if it disrupts surrounding functionality, or if your test effort should be modified.
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David Dang, Questcon Technologies, A Division of Howard Systems Intl.
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STAREAST 2008: Seven Habits of Highly Effective Automation Testers In many organizations, test automation is becoming a specialized career path. Mukesh Mulchandani identifies seven habits of highly effective automation specialists and compares them with Stephen Covey's classic Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Mukesh not only describes behavior patterns of effective automation testers but he also discusses how to internalize these patterns so that you use them instinctively. Drawing on his experience of managing large test automation projects for financial applications, Mukesh describes obvious habits such as saving and reusing tests. He then describes the uncommon but essential habits of strategizing, seeking, selling, and communicating. Learn how to avoid the bad habits that automation test novices-and even experts-may unconsciously adopt.
- Keys to successful test automation
- Leadership skills needed by test automation specialists
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Mukesh Mulchandani, ZenTEST Labs
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Learning From the Past: Leveraging Defect Data If test improvement activities are to be successful, we must convince management that our efforts are focused on areas with significant payback opportunities. Brian Robinson reports that in his organization a data-driven approach to improvement has led management, developers, and testers to adopt new approaches and strategies. They collect data from their existing defect tracking system, source code repository, and a document management system used in development. From this data, they analyze and classify defects that impacted schedule (late phase test failures) or cost (customer failures). Each defect type is then mapped to a test phase that is responsible for finding it. This mapping helps define a test strategy for each phase of testing. At the same time, areas for test improvement become obvious.
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Brian Robinson, ABB Inc.
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For Success, Build Record/Playback into Your Application Stories about failed attempts to automate functional testing are very easy to find and have given the record/playback style test automation a black eye. Is this approach fundamentally flawed or can the business benefits of automated testing be realized through recorded tests? The flaw with most commercial record/playback tools is that they are intended for use with existing applications that have not been designed for testability. Therefore, the tools can only interact with the application through the user interface, making execution slow and prone to flakiness because user interfaces make terrible machine interfaces. Gerard Meszaros introduces the concept of designing testability and test recording capabilities directly into the application. This approach allows automated tests to interact with the application via a programming API to make them much more robust.
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Gerard Meszaros, ClearStream Consulting
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Component-Based Test Automation Creating software applications by assembling pre-built components has proved to be very successful on many development projects. Just as component-based development can reduce the time-to-market of high quality software, the same concept is equally applicable to automated testing. Vincenzo Cuomo introduces an approach to test automation called Component-based Testing. Using this method, you design and create reusable, highly configurable test components that can be assembled into application-specific test scripts. Vincenzo presents a case study to illustrate Component-based Testing concepts and demonstrates how you can build test components that are application independent and self-contained. In Vincenzo's experience, Component-based Testing has resulted in higher test case reusability (up to 80%) and a remarkable reduction of testing time and cost (up to 50%).
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Vincenzo Cuomo, ST Incard
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50 Ways to ...Improve Test Automation Although this session is not about Paul Simon's famous song, "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover", it will be most entertaining nonetheless. In this fast-paced presentation, Mark Fewster shares fifty ways for you to consider, adopt, or adapt to meet your organization's needs-management, metrics, organizational structure, scripting methods, comparison techniques, testware architecture, and many more. These ideas will give you fresh insight into your current processes and help you identify actions to reverse undesirable trends, correct ailing procedures, and magnify the benefits of test automation. Although the ideas cannot be discussed in great detail due to time restrictions, there will be enough information for you to understand and then apply. So join Mark-become informed, enthusiastic, and even entertained by this whirlwind of test automation ideas.
- Key areas of test automation or failure
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Mark Fewster, Grove Consultants
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Managing Keyword-Driven Testing Keyword-driven test automation has become quite popular and has entered the mainstream of test automation. Although some hail it as a panacea, many companies using it in one form or another have been disappointed. Keyword-driven testing projects succeed only if they are managed well. This presentation is not about the keyword method itself. Instead, Hans Buwalda focuses on the management side: how to manage a keyword-driven project. What are the factors that indicate progress and success? What are the common risks for a keyword project? Hans shares insights he has gathered in countless keyword projects in many industries all over the world. Many of the lessons he presents were learned the hard way. Learn from Hans' successes and mistakes and become more successful with your keyword-driven automation.
- The success factors and risks for keyword-based automation
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Hans Buwalda, LogiGear Corporation
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User Interface Testing with Microsoft Visual C# Manually testing software with a complex user interface (UI) is time-consuming and expensive. Historically the development and maintenance costs associated with automating UI testing have been very high. Vijay Upadya presents a case study on the approaches and methodologies his Microsoft Visual C# test team adopted to answer the testing challenges that have plagued them for years. Vijay explains how the test team worked with developers to design high levels of testability into Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. These testability features enabled the test team to design a highly robust and effective test suite which completely bypasses the UI. Join Vijay to find out how they adopted data driven testing below the UI and achieved dramatic cost reductions in developing and maintaining their tests.
- How to bypass the user interface without compromising test effectiveness
- Designs for software with high testability
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Vijay Upadya, Microsoft Corporation
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Apodora: An Open Source Framework for Web Testing Are you frustrated with automated test scripts that require constant maintenance and don't seem to be worth the effort? Seth Southern introduces Apodora, a new open source framework for automating functional testing of Web applications. Apodora was released under the GNU General Public License to the open source community with the goal of collaboratively creating a superior, free, automated Web testing tool. The key benefit of Apodora is to help you reduce the maintenance and overhead of test automation scripts. Seth introduces you to the open source project, demonstrates the use of Apodora, and highlights some of the key differences between Apodora and other test automation tools currently available. Seth shows how Apodora can save you time when the software under test changes and scripts require maintenance.
- Web test tool gaps that Apodora fills
- Features of Apodora for functional Web testing
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Seth Southern, ACULIS - Software Development Services
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The Ten Most Important Automation Questions-and Answers As test automation becomes more complex, many important strategic issues emerge. Mukesh Mulchandani shares key questions you must answer before you begin a test automation project or an improvement program. He begins with the elementary questions. Should I automate now or wait? What specifically should I automate? What approach should I adopt? Mukesh then considers more complex questions: vertical vs. horizontal automation, handling static and dynamic data, and testing dynamic objects. The final questions relate to future automation trends: moving beyond keywords automation technology, making automation scripts extensible, introducing test-driven development, starting automation when the application is not yet stable, and offering the automation scripts to clients.
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Mukesh Mulchandani and Krishna Iyer, ZenTEST Labs
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