Experiences of Test Automation: Case Studies of Software Test Automation

Front Cover
Addison-Wesley Professional, 2012 - Computers - 617 pages
Software test automation has moved beyond a luxury to become a necessity. Applications and systems have grown ever larger and more complex, and manual testing simply cannot keep up. As technology changes, and more organizations move into agile development, testing must adapt--and quickly. Test automation is essential, but poor automation is wasteful--how do you know where your efforts will take you?

Authors Dorothy Graham and Mark Fewster wrote the field's seminal text, Software Test Automation, which has guided many organizations toward success. Now, in Experiences of Test Automation, they reveal test automation at work in a wide spectrum of organizations and projects, from complex government systems to medical devices, SAP business process development to Android mobile apps and cloud migrations. This book addresses both management and technical issues, describing failures and successes, brilliant ideas and disastrous decisions and, above all, offers specific lessons you can use.

Coverage includes

  • Test automation in agile development
  • How management support can make or break successful automation
  • The importance of a good testware architecture and abstraction levels
  • Measuring benefits and Return on Investment (ROI)
  • Management issues, including skills, planning, scope, and expectations
  • Model-Based Testing (MBT), monkey testing, and exploratory test automation
  • The importance of standards, communication, documentation, and flexibility in enterprise-wide automation
  • Automating support activities
  • Which tests to automate, and what not to automate
  • Hidden costs of automation: maintenance and failure analysis
  • The right objectives for test automation: why "finding bugs" may not be a good objective
  • Highlights, consisting of lessons learned, good points, and helpful tips

Experiences of Test Automation will be invaluable to everyone considering, implementing, using, or managing test automation. Testers, analysts, developers, automators and automation architects, test managers, project managers, QA professionals, and technical directors will all benefit from reading this book.

From inside the book

Contents

Foreword
xxix
Preface
xxxi
Reflections on the Case Studies
1
The First Year
17
Chapter 2 The Ultimate Database Automation
33
The Evolution of TiP Continuous Regression Testing in Production
49
Chapter 4 The Automator Becomes the Automated
69
From Mainframe Framework Automation
83
Chapter 17 Choosing the Wrong Tool
321
Ten Years and Three Frameworks
339
Thinking Outside the Box
355
Chapter 20 Software for Medical Devices and Our Need for Good Software Test Automation
375
Chapter 21 Automation through the Back Door by Supporting Manual Testing
401
Chapter 22 Test Automation as an Approach to Adding Value to Portability Testing
425
Feeling Our Way
437
Chapter 24 Adventures with Test Monkeys
447

Failure Project 2 Success
105
Chapter 7 Automating the Testing of Complex Government Systems
129
Chapter 8 Device Simulation Framework
143
Chapter 9 ModelBased TestCase Generation in ESA Projects
155
Chapter 10 Ten Years On and Still Going
177
Chapter 11 A Rising Phoenix from the Ashes
197
Chapter 12 Automating the Wheels of Bureaucracy
217
Chapter 13 Automated Reliability Testing Using Hardware Interfaces
237
Chapter 14 ModelBased GUI Testing of Android Applications
253
Chapter 15 Test Automation of SAP Business Processes
277
Chapter 16 Test Automation of a SAP Implementation
295
Chapter 25 SystemofSystems Test Automation at NATS
461
Chapter 26 Automating Automotive Electronics Testing
477
Chapter 27 BHAGs Change and Test Transformation
485
An Example Ahead Its Time
505
Chapter 29 Test Automation Anecdotes
523
Tools
573
About the Case Study Authors
587
About the Book Authors
605
Index
607
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