As you embark on implementing or improving automation within your testing process, you'll want to avoid the "Just Do It" attitude some have taken. Perhaps you've heard the term "test automation framework" and wondered what it means, what it does for testing, and if you need one. Andrew Pollner, who has developed automated testing frameworks for more than fifteen years, outlines how frameworks have grown up around test automation tools. Regardless of which automation tool you use, the concepts of a framework are similar. Andrew answers many of your questions: Why build a framework? What benefit does it provide? What does it cost to build a framework? What ROI can I expect when using a framework? Explore the different approaches to framework development and identify problems to watch out for to ensure the approach you take will provide years of productivity.

Manual testing is the best way to find the bugs most likely to bite users badly after a product ships. However, manual testing remains a very ad hoc, aimless process. At a number of companies across the globe, groups of test innovators gathered in think tank settings to create a better way to do manual testing—a way that is more prescriptive, repeatable, and capable of finding the highest quality bugs. The result is a new methodology for exploratory testing based on the concept of tours through the application under test. In short, tours represent a more purposeful way to plan and execute exploratory tests. James Whittaker describes the tourist metaphor for this novel approach and demonstrates tours taken by test teams from various companies including Microsoft and Google. He presents results from numerous projects where the tours were used in critical-path production environments.

The use of modular design in programming has been a common technique in software development for years. However, the same principles that make modular designs useful for programming-increased reusability and reduced maintenance time-are equally applicable to test case development. Shaun Bradshaw describes the key differences between procedural and modular test case development and explains the benefits of the modular approach. He demonstrates how to analyze requirements, designs, and the application under test to generate modular and reusable test cases. Join Shaun as he constructs and executes test scenarios using skeleton scripts that invoke the modular tests. Learn how you can design and create a few self-contained scripts (building blocks) that then can be assembled to create many different test scenarios.

Test automation teams are typically created with the expectation of facilitating faster testing and higher product quality. To achieve these goals, the test
automation team must overcome many challenges--stale test data, burdensome test script maintenance, too-frequent product upgrades, insufficient resources, and unfamiliarity with the systems under test. Satya Mantena describes a creative approach to test automation that overcomes
these challenges. The first step is implementing keyword-driven testing. Satya demonstrates how the keyword testing approach is implemented proving this approach is not just theory but has been "proven in action." Satya concludes
by showing how positioning the test automation team as a "product" rather than as a central service, or embedded within each testing team, results in better testing.

• Examine the difference between a service and a product