Presentation Level: Advanced Practitioner
| Time: | Place: |
| 3:15 - 3:30 PM - Registration 3:00 - 5:00 PM - General Meeting 5:00 - 6:00 PM - CMM SIG |
Southdale-Hennepin Area Library 7001 York Avenue South Edina, MN Map & Directions |
Once you have bought the tools, learned the syntax, and written your first scripts which actually do real testing: where do you go from here? One of the great unsolved (often unasked) questions of automation is, "How do I make this automation which I am creating a part of my regular testing process?"Too often we work so hard at making the automation process work, we forget what
problems we were trying to solve. If you have an automation program started, ask yourself the following
questions based on the following premise: All of our automation efforts are going to be wildly successful.
- How will we run our hundreds (thousands) of scripts? (Hint -- if you don't build fault tolerance into them, the answer will be one at a time.)
- How will we know the results of these runs? (Hint -- try reading the output
- logs of your automation tool for 100 different test runs.)
- How will we manage the complexity of updating scripts when applications, testing environments, and personnel change?
- How will we target new scripts?
- How will we deal with the shortcomings of our tool set?
- When we are long gone and someone else is running the tests, how will they know what is being tested by each script?
At American Express they have been asking these and other questions about automation. Jamie will be prepared to talk about these and other questions which may come up about the long range implications of automation and how you can start planning to deal with them now.
Concrete examples, pseudo code (applicable to all automation tools), and plenty of real experience with the problems of automation will be available.
Jamie L. Mitchell is currently the Lead Automation Engineer for the Distributed Integration Testing group for American Express Technologies Operations. He has been involved in automation projects throughout American Express Financial Advisors as Automator, designer and architect. Jamie has worked with test automation tools since the first ones were released with Windows 3.0, including stints with Prudential Insurance, IBM AS/400 division, and ShowCase Corporation. He was awarded the Master of Computer Science degree in January, 1992 from Lehigh University and is a QAI Certified Software Test Engineer. He resides in Rochester, MN and is an active member of the TCQAA organization.
Following our main presentation, you are invited to join the meeting of TCQAA’s CMM Special Interest Group (CMM-SIG). They will meet for about an hour, starting shortly after the general program.