Friday, August 5, 2011

Test automation challenges

Organization may be having the best test automation practice but test assets are inadequate. Such automation investment is of no use. Management will be wondering on so much money invested- on tools, training, hiring skilled engineers and scripting effort but defect escape to production is still bothering them.

Many parents who wanted their children to be successful in their life, sponsor them for whatever certification courses their son/daughter wanted to do after their graduation. Common mistake which I have observed is, parents sending them for some test automation tool training and get the certification. If you see the data points on how many were successful with that path, it is not that encouraging. Why? What went wrong? Automation of wrong tests may not yield anything as business value to organization. They need to understand what are the right test to automate is before starting on test automation. If that skill is not there difficult fro them to be successful in this path.

Another issue is organization management tracking on what percentage of tests automated than how it was done? They get some shocks like the automated scripts not working on new version of product but effort required to maintain scripts not possible to allocate with release pressure and scripts were dumped as useless assets. No frame work used and no standards in scriting maintenance is complicated.

The tool used for automation will not be supported from vendor from that year!. (Phased out tool), but automated scripts is really reducing test effort, helping in doing better regression tests, helping multi-platform tests etc. Oops! what to do? How can we accelerate porting these automated test solution to another tool?

HBT helps to address some of these challenges. Take a look at the following PPT

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